


Firebug: Book I - Chiân Maeroris and the Secret Library of Fire

by BoogleBoot



Series: The Firebug Books [1]
Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies), Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Action/Adventure, Book: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Care of Magical Creatures, Character Development, Charms Class (Harry Potter), Christmas, Curse Breaking, Cursed objects, Curses, Danger, Dark Arts, Defense Against the Dark Arts, Demiguises, Diagon Alley, Disillusionment Charm (Harry Potter), Divination, Dungeons (Harry Potter), Emotionally Repressed, Established Relationship, Fear, Fiendfyre (Harry Potter), Flying, Friendship, Gen, Good Slytherins, Gryffindor, Gryffindor & Slytherin Inter-House Friendships, Gryffindor Common Room, Harry Potter Next Generation, Hogsmeade, Hogwarts, Hogwarts Express, Hogwarts Fifth Year, Hogwarts First Year, Hogwarts Forbidden Forest, Hogwarts Kitchens, Hogwarts Professors, Hogwarts School Grounds, Hogwarts Sixth Year, House Elves, LGBTQ Character, LGBTQ Female Character, Lesbian Character, Lesbian Relationship, Magic, Male-Female Friendship, Memory Loss, Memory Magic, Memory Related, Minor Original Character(s), Muggle London, Muggle Technology, Muggle-born, Muggle/Wizard Relations, Mystery, Next Generation, No Smut, O.W.L.s | Ordinary Wizarding Levels, Obscurial Harry Potter, Obscurials (Harry Potter), Obscurus (Harry Potter), Original Character(s), Original Female Character(s) - Freeform, Original Fiction, Owl Post (Harry Potter), Plot, Portraits, Post-Canon, Post-Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Post-Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Post-Hogwarts, Potions, Potions Class (Harry Potter), Psychomancy, Pureblood Culture (Harry Potter), Quidditch, Rating: PG13, Representation, Repressed Memories, Rubeus House and Gardens, Rubeus sanctuary for Magical Creatures, SPEW | Society for the Promotion of Elvish Welfare, School, Secret Library of Fire, Self-Discovery, Slytherin, Slytherin Common Room, Slytherin Harry Potter, Slytherin Pride, Slytherins Being Slytherins, Spells & Enchantments, Strong Female Characters, Strong Female Protagonist, Strong Language, The Great Lake | The Black Lake (Harry Potter), The Legacy of Slytherin, The Owlery (Harry Potter), The Restricted Section (Harry Potter), The Sorting Hat, Thestrals, Transfiguration (Harry Potter), Wandlore (Harry Potter), Wands, Wizarding World (Harry Potter), Wordcount: 50.000-100.000, Worth Re-Reading, firebug, strong female character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-06
Updated: 2020-06-06
Packaged: 2021-03-03 18:55:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 17
Words: 69,150
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24570409
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BoogleBoot/pseuds/BoogleBoot
Summary: The Firebug books are an original set of post-canonical stories set an indeterminate but significant time after the Harry Potter books. Chiân Maeroris is an original character, who receives her Hogwarts letter on her eleventh birthday. Book I - the Secret Library of Fire details the story of her first year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.This story is a tribute to the world and magic of Harry Potter. It builds upon the universe created by J. K. Rowling but uses only original characters. References to the Harry Potter books appear explicitly but are also implicit in the world-building taken as precedent for the setting of this story.
Series: The Firebug Books [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1815601
Comments: 7
Kudos: 15





	1. Wiseman and the Wand

**Author's Note:**

> I have edited this to the best of my ability, but please do notify me if you find any spelling or formatting errors - or worse, any inconsistencies in plot or naming.
> 
> For any other inquiries - business or unrelated - please contact my agent at kristin.r.briggs@gmail.com
> 
> I have also recorded myself reading each chapter out loud (though again, with the occasional mistake). The full audiobook can be found in a playlist here:
> 
> https://soundcloud.com/kristin-briggs/sets/firebug-book-i-chian-maeroris-and-the-secret-library-of-fire/s-Ikj2jpymg6t

When everything changes, it can be difficult at first to spot what is wrong.

It was a matter of weeks between receiving the letter and standing on the tube station platform in a light, early morning rain. Chiân already had much to think about. The letter itself had been a lot, but not nearly as overwhelming as the explosive tension between her mother and father that had permeated the air ever since it had arrived.

Chiân had buried herself for days at a time in her room, reading it over and over again, her headphones in her ears and her music loud, trying to drown out the shouting.

Chiân had taken herself out of the house on the day of the Diagon Alley trip, downing red bull all night to keep herself awake and slipping out of the front door just after five am to catch the first tube train into London. Her school satchel was empty – even of its usual gum wrappers and pencil shavings – in preparation for the wild amounts of shopping she was supposed to do.

It was nearly half five by the time she reached the tube station. Chiân hadn’t dared try to get her bike out of the back yard in case she woke up her dad, who was sleeping on the couch again.

The tube was a familiar and timeless place and Chiân didn’t have to think as she made her way into central London. She was cracking open her third energy drink as she climbed the steps back up to the surface at ten past seven.

It was a few hours til nine, which was when she was supposed to be meeting up with – she checked the letter for maybe the four hundredth time – Mr Rinstone. She found the dingy looking pub and squinted up at the sign. A grumpy looking man in a suit pushed her out of the way and muttered something rude as she stood there, and Chiân, despite her misgivings, thought she’d better go in.

“You alright, dear?” asked the barman in surprise, looking up at her as soon as she entered. There were very few people in the pub. Chiân supposed that it was a bit early for a pub to even be open, let alone busy.

“Yes. I’m here for, er,” she still didn’t quite trust the word ‘Hogwarts’, but in her hesitation the man seemed to understand.

“Ah, you’re part of the school group! Well,” he glanced at a clock which, aside from being indecipherably dirty, seemed to have about fifty numbers and only one hand. “You’re a bit early, dear.”

Chiân didn’t really want to talk to this man, but also didn’t want to just stand there for two hours like an idiot. She approached the bar and climbed onto one of the high, wobbly chairs, slinking down into her hoodie in an attempt to hide from the world.

The man kindly offered to give her a breakfast bun free of charge, and Chiân gratefully accepted. She looked around her for a few minutes as he went back into what Chiân had to assume was a kitchen.

The sign had said _The Leaky Cauldron_ , just like the letter had specified, so she was definitely in the right place. Chiân couldn’t help wondering why on earth she had been directed to a pub of all places when what she really needed were shops – magical ones, at that. She read her letter for the four hundred and first time.

“You a muggle-born?” The barman asked, watching her frown at the letter.

“Um…” Chiân said.

He chuckled. “Non-wizard blood’s all I mean. Just thought you look like you might not have done this before. Must be all a bit strange for you,” he smiled at her.

She agreed and smiled back weakly. He popped back into the kitchen and carried out her breakfast bun, which appeared to be an entire continental breakfast between two enormous slices of bread. Chiân’s energy-drink ridden stomach burbled at the sight of it. Deciding that the man’s kindness deserved a little openness, Chiân said “My dad’s magic. Mum’s not, though. She hates it.”

The barman raised his eyebrows. “How’s that, then?”

Chiân shrugged, her mouth already full. She was enjoying her breakfast bun. “Dad says it nearly ruined their marriage when he first told mum so he’d promised not to do any of it ever again or something. I’ve been able to do like, magic stuff ever since I can remember. I try not to, though. It upsets my mum.”

The barman looked slightly alarmed and put down the cutlery he was drying. The tea towel continued polishing without him. “Well, that sounds like a tricky place to be. What did she do when you got your Hogwarts letter?”

Something monumental shifted in Chiân’s chest when he said the word ‘Hogwarts’. It was like it was suddenly real. She couldn’t catch her breath for a few seconds, and grinned in spite of herself when she answered.

“She was really mad. She’s said I can’t go, but dad’s fighting her on it.”

“I’ll bet he is!”

“Yeah. I have an older brother, but he’s never like, done anything magical.” She thought about Tian and got quiet. She hadn’t seen him in weeks. Not since the arguing started, really. He often spent days at a time out of the house. Chiân could only assume it was to get away from the bickering, the constant tension and the nagging of their parents, but it had been almost a month now. Not that Chiân minded. She got the whole bedroom to herself this way.

“So, you excited? Bet you can’t wait to do some magic.” He had asked the question in a gentle, bright way, but his smile faded a little when he met her eyes.

Chiân held his gaze for a long time. All the words had dried up, for both of them it seemed.

Before the barman could voice whatever growing concern was on his face another customer called out to him, coming up to the bar and greeting him warmly.

Distracted by his friend the barman left Chiân to eat in peace, which she did, quickly thanking him and removing herself to a distant corner before he could re-engage her in conversation.

She spent the rest of the morning listening to music on her phone and watching the inhabitants of the pub. The slowly increasing flow of customers were all dressed in long, colourful robes. Some of them even wore pointy hats, which Chiân thought was a bit ridiculous. Some of them did not appear to be human.

Chiân’s earphones kept glitching and bugging out as she sat there. They hadn’t done this before and it irritated her.

She was just poking around in the headphone socket to see if something was blocking it when the door swung open and several other kids shuffled in, one or two accompanied by parents. Chiân flipped her phone and noticed it was two minutes past nine.

Soon enough there was a group of four or five kids and their parents standing around in a nervous cluster. Chiân decided it was time to join them and got up from her table. At the same moment a man strode into the pub from some back room, arms wide, face jolly.

“Welcome, welcome, hello! I am Mr Rinstone, and I shall be your guide for the day.” He chuckled. He was short and theatrical, round, and loud.

All of this made him very easy to listen to and very difficult to lose in the bustle of the day. The other kids and Chiân had watched, impressed, as he tapped the bricks in a back wall of the pub. At his tapping the bricks had unfolded to reveal the weirdest London street Chiân had ever been down. Mr Rinstone led the group down it, talking cheerfully about how it was the highlight of his job, taking the new students around Diagon Alley each autumn. Chiân gathered that he was manager of the Leaky Cauldron pub, and many years ago had volunteered to be the tour guide for Diagon Alley to new, uninitiated muggle-born kids and their families.

Mr Rinstone had explained that the school had a fund for such students who couldn’t afford the extravagant number of spell books and potions ingredients, and for Muggle-borns whose families did not yet have something called a ‘Gringotts vault’. Chiân’s stomach had clenched a little when she realised that she was the only one there who was not accompanied by a family member, but she resolutely dismissed this as an after-effect of the breakfast bun.

For the next hour or so the group followed Mr Rinstone around from strange shop to strange shop. The other kids grew more and more confident with excitement, running to and fro and shouting requests to their parents that they buy them colour-changing inks and whatnot, whether it was on their list or not. Chiân got quieter and quieter, her bag heavier and heavier as it filled with thick bottles of potion ingredients, spell books, and robes. Getting fitted for the various parts of her new school uniform was the only moment in which Chiân was grateful that she was amongst other new students – she was certain that she would feel too embarrassed at the over-the-top robes to even go into the shop if she had been on her own.

Eventually they got to a shop named “Warlock and Wiseman”, which sold wands.

Chiân felt, for the first time, like she might actually be sick. As the others bustled in, Mr Rinstone noticed her hanging back outside the shop. “Are you alright – er, what was your name?”

“Chiân.”

“Sorry? Didn’t catch that?” He said cheerfully, bending down to hear her.

She cleared her throat. “I’m Chiân. Um, do we _need_ magic wands?”

Mr Rinstone looked startled for a second, then chuckled heartily. “Of course! It’s the very soul of magic, the wand. No witch or wizard can do without one, really!” He spotted the scowl on Chiân’s face and, misinterpreting her stormy expression, added in a gentler way “don’t you worry, you won’t lose it.”

This had not been what was worrying Chiân. She followed him in but slouched by the shop window, watching the staff of the shop bustle around attending to each new student with attentive and encouraging service. A memory was playing itself in Chiân’s head over and over again: a hand, outstretched, her arms raised, her mother screaming, and a deafening explosion. The dust from the ceiling, the shaking of her fingers, the hospital trip, and her dad weeping openly during the ambulance ride. The terror, the noise, and the movement within her of something she couldn’t control.

Everything was new at the moment, here in this wizarding high street and this dimly-lit wand shop, but this was an unsettling kind of strangeness. Chiân was having to work very hard not to run from everything in this deeply strange world which, up until now, had been a source of great grief for her family. Chiân had glimpsed it before in only a few moments of her childhood, and the very heaviest of these memories was the time she had nearly killed her entire family with a wand.

There had only been one other customer in the shop when their group had arrived, and by the time it was Chiân’s turn to be tested for a wand the place was nearly empty again. The other families had cleared off one by one to an ice-cream shop down the street where they would all be having lunch before dispersing.

Chiân assured Mr Rinstone that she could find her way there once she was done and he needn’t wait for her here. He beamed encouragingly at her, then bustled out of the shop to rejoin the group.

“Hello, there. I’m Mister Brennan Gelder,” said the shop assistant, approaching her and shaking her hand. She introduced herself and followed him over to a table which had a few sample wands and notepads on it.

She’d gotten the gist watching the other kids do this, so glazed over a little as Mr Gelder explained that they would get her to hold a few wands and jot down the responses, using that to hopefully pinpoint what kind of wand would suit her best.

“The first time a magical person touches a wand is a significant moment,” he said, regaining her attention. These words made Chiân’s gut clench again. He had pushed one of the long thin boxes towards her so they could start. It was already open.

Chiân swallowed.

“Go on, don’t be shy,” he encouraged her.

She reached out a hand tentatively, and the hand in her memory reached back. Her fingers clenched against her will.

It was a long, tense moment.

Head reeling, arm frozen stiff, Chiân snarled at herself. “Come on, don’t be a wimp. It’s not gonna happen again – come _on-“_ and she took the wand.

Nothing happened.

Chiân let out a long breath and Mr Gelder frowned.

“Hmm, that’s… unusual,” he said, glancing down at a chart on the desk.

“What is?” Chiân said with false brightness. She was holding the wand awkwardly, trying not to move at all, staring at it as if it might explode.

Mr Gelder didn’t answer but took the wand back from her and handed her another one. The same lack of thing happened. He swapped it for another one, and then another one, and then another.

None of them had any effect. One or two of the many that Chiân tried in the next twenty minutes seemed to twitch and give her a slight tingling feeling in her wrists, but nothing significant. Mr Gelder’s professional manner was slipping with his increasing bewilderment and Chiân recalled how each wand the other students had tried had bucked, or whistled, or emitted sparks when the kids had held them – even the ones which weren’t the ones they eventually bought.

‘The wand chooses the wizard’, the staff had all kept saying; it seemed to be the slogan of the shop, or at least some kind of wizarding maxim. Chiân wondered if her own powerful apprehension and fear was making the wands equally wary of her.

Mr Gelder had gone to fetch two of his associates by this point, and Chiân had relaxed enough to enjoy their bewilderment.

“I don’t understand it – _nothing –_ “

“Are you sure, Brennie?”

“Have you tried her with the dragon heartstring?” One of the others was glancing at the notes.

They went and fetched more boxes, going further and further back into the shop, an increasing mix of agitation and excitement on everyone’s faces.

“Perhaps something unconventional-“

“We’ve already tried Skrewt shell, Veela Hair, _and_ Bezor tooth, Strawberry. What’s left?”

“Maybe there’s been a mistake,” said a tall thin man named, apparently, ‘Strawberry’. He peered intently into Chiân’s face. “I don’t mean to pry, missy, but are you sure you are, in fact, magical?”

“A squib, maybe,” murmured the lady behind him, nodding with wide eyes. Chiân did not know what this meant, but looked from face to face while she tried to phrase her answer.

Before she could say anything the door of the shop opened and Mr Rinstone came back in. “Merlin’s beard, you’re still here!” He exclaimed upon seeing her. He took in the precarious tower of wand boxes next to the desk and the three harried, bright-eyed shop assistants. “Don’t tell me you still haven’t found her a wand?”

There was some indignant exclaiming in response to his astonishment.

“Everyone else has gone home,” Mr Rinstone added to Chiân. “We assumed you had left after getting your wand. It’s been nearly two hours, you know.”

At that moment a hush descended. The shop staff had been bickering about something to do with experimental acrylics in wand-wood, but fell silent at the arrival of a much older man on the veranda above them.

He was wearing a deep plum-coloured velvet suit and a patterned green and white waistcoat which looked very fine, although a bit dusty. He was also wearing an honest-to-God monocle, which he appeared to keep in his eye socket by squinting with only the left side of his face.

“Mr Wiseman, sir”, said the woman, bowing slightly.

“Chiân,” he said, descending the stairs down to the shop floor. Chiân jumped, but only a little, and looked up at him. “Have you ever held a wand before?”

“Uhh,” all eyes turned to her, but she kept her gaze upon the old man. Something in his seriousness made her trust him in a way which did not come easily to her. “Yes. Once.”

He nodded as if he had expected this. Chiân wanted to add “I blew up my house”, but didn’t. She thought the memory might be so big at this point that it probably wouldn’t be able to fit through her mouth.

Mr Wiseman looked at her intently and came to a stop in the middle of the shop floor. He pulled out his wand and, much to the surprise of everybody, offered it to Chiân.

He smiled very slightly at her expression. “No, I’m not giving it to you, just running a test.”

The way he said this made Chiân wonder if he could hear her thoughts – they were certainly loud ones.

“A little, yes,” he said, and definitely smiled this time at her stunned expression. He raised his wand again, holding it out to her.

In the hushed silence Chiân dared to take it.

“Now, try to move this.” He stepped to the desk and pulled from his waistcoat pocket a small rubber ball. He placed it on the table.

Chiân was experiencing waves of alarm that were undercut by a strong riptide of terror. Yet something in the old man’s face made her raise her chin in stubborn determination. Still looking straight at him, she raised the wand, tight in her grip.

 _‘I can do better than that’,_ she thought as clearly as possible at him. The smirk that he gave replied quite clearly with _‘Oh, I bet you can’._

Every eye upon her, Chiân took a breath, and _moved_.

It was an old feeling – an instinct beyond anything she could verbalise. She felt it burst out of her chest and ripple down her outstretched arm. She felt the force circumvent the wand as she directed the feeling out towards the ball. It wobbled, then burst into a small bunch of vibrant spring flowers.

There were gasps and even a few claps of genuine applause from the watching adults.

“Where on earth did you learn to do that?” exclaimed Mr Gelder, rushing forward to examine the flowers. Mr Rinstone was positively shouting with enthusiasm.

Breathless, Chiân gripped the wand and looked pleadingly up at Mr Wiseman.

Much to the disappointment of the three shop assistants, Mr Wiseman asked if he could have the room for a moment. Mr Rinstone did not move at first, then started under Mr Wiseman’s shrewd gaze, mumbling his apologies and removing himself from the shop to wait outside.

It was just Chiân now, breathing heavily and watching Mr Wiseman with apprehension.

“Please take it back. I don’t… I don’t think I want it, if that’s okay.” She didn’t want to offend him by rejecting his wand.

He again seemed to hear her thoughts. “That is not my wand.” He said simply, pulling from within his velvet jacket a very similar strip of elegant birch.

Chiân stared at it, then at him. “I don’t understand.” She looked at the wand in her hand.

“That,” he reached out his hand and she gave it back to him, “is not a real wand. Or rather, it is an unfinished one. There are not many witches or wizards who could make so much as a squawk come out of it.” He placed the non-wand back on the desk and waved his real wand so that the many discarded boxes began to flap closed and gently float back to their positions on the high shelves.

Chiân found that she was trembling. Before she could voice anything though, he beckoned her to a seat next to the stairs.

“Chiân, you have gained an unusual – well – really an extraordinary level of control over your nascent abilities. You did not need a wand to do that,” he picked up the flowers and examined them.

“I don’t like wands,” whispered Chiân once the silence had become uncomfortable.

“No, understandably,” he said lightly. “But I must warn you, magic is not easily channeled without one. It can be very, very dangerous to attempt serious magic without an aid. You need not be frightened, Chiân. You are not the first nor will you be the last who has found that they can, with great effort, move their abilities to their will, but magic has a will of its own.”

“Like the wands do?” She asked.

He looked thoughtful. “A little, yes. If you like. The wand is a congruence of magical components which complement and aid the user. If you find the right wand you will find your abilities are magnified – not to mention more… focused.”

“But they couldn’t seem to find one for me. They’ve tried so many,” Chiân gestured desperately to the last of the boxes which were jostling each other out of the way onto the shelves.

“No indeed,” Mr Wiseman said mildly. They looked at each other for a few moments. Chiân felt as if she was being examined. “I wonder, Miss- ?”

“Uh, Maeroris.”

“Miss Maeroris. Would you permit me to take one of your hairs?”

“My – what?”

“A hair, from your head,” he said again, and pointed his real wand at her.

She had barely said “yes” when a single strand of her limp blonde hair had tugged itself out of her ponytail and detached from her head. It floated over to Mr Wiseman, who was once more holding the unfinished wand.

“This won’t take a moment”, he murmured without looking at her. He was stood slightly hunched in concentration and Chiân watched, fascinated as he raised the piece of the wand up to the hair and they hung there, turning slowly. He seemed to be pulling at invisible strings, engrossed and completely concentrated.

In the idle moments of the past few weeks when Chiân had daydreamed about what a real witch or wizard might look like, this was pretty much exactly what she had seen. The old man’s face had come alive, dusted clean in the slight silver glow which was now coming from the objects in front of him. The monocle in his eye had sprouted tiny golden hinges which held a number of smaller lenses in front of the glass. He was peering through them, his other eye closed. His whispering and intricate, tiny finger movements manipulated the two objects mysteriously and after a few minutes she saw him smile as if in dawning realisation, before taking a single flower from the bunch next to him, and lifting it to the glow.

There was a noise like a chord played on a far off church organ. A bursting golden light for just a moment hid Mr Wiseman almost entirely from view. Red and green and purple sparks seemed to zoom through the ball of light like miniature planets around a startling sun, and then it faded, leaving Chiân blinking in the new gloom of the shop.

Mr Wiseman beckoned to her and held out the wand. The atmosphere of the room held a new edge and they shared a look of anticipation.

Without hesitation this time, Chiân took the wand.

The chord returned, and it came from within her chest, triumphant and fearless. Blinking fast in a sudden wind, Chiân found herself laughing. The wand trembled in her hand and felt warm and friendly. Slight green and gold light seemed to ripple up it for a moment until, once more, the room was still.

Chiân felt lighter than she had done since the morning her letter had arrived. She beamed up at Mr Wiseman, who returned the smile.

“Thank you,” she said with as much sincerity as she could muster.

“You’re very welcome, child.” He called Mr Gelder back in to sort out the payment, and had a few words for her in parting. “Miss Maeroris,”

“Yes?”

“Do not fear magic. It comes with an instinct you should learn to trust.”

Chiân met his searching look with a thoughtful one of her own, before thanking him and Mr Gelder one more time and leaving the shop.

Mr Rinstone was full of eager questions. He walked her back to the Leaky Cauldron pub and out into the pigeon-infested grit of muggle London, speculating about her wand and the strangeness of Mr Wiseman, but Chiân was too happy to pay any attention.

On the tube journey home she tucked the wand safely into her hoodie pocket. Her bag was heavy and full of spell books and she kept it tucked between her feet, thinking. Her earphones were working fine again, which was nice. She came out of the station with her hands in her pocket, touching her wand. When she saw her dad’s car outside the station she gripped it tightly.

Maybe it was only warm because she had been holding it so closely for so long, but as she walked towards the inevitable fight about sneaking out and disappearing for a day without answering any texts or phonecalls, that warmth made her feel brave.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> An audio recording of this chapter can be found here:
> 
> https://soundcloud.com/kristin-briggs/chapter-one-wiseman-and-the-wand-audio-recording/s-uzObkn7fjr6
> 
> The full audiobook playlist is here:
> 
> https://soundcloud.com/kristin-briggs/sets/firebug-book-i-chian-maeroris-and-the-secret-library-of-fire/s-Ikj2jpymg6t


	2. Trains, Boats, and Carriages

It was early morning on the first of September. Derek the security guard was prizing the cheap plastic lid off his burning hot coffee. On the screens next to him was a mostly empty, slowly lightening King’s Cross station.

“Ow,” muttered Derek as the lid came off and he slopped hot coffee onto his hand. Grabbing a napkin and turning away from the monitors, he missed a small figure coming out from between the the boutiques, lugging a rather cumbersome suitcase along with her.

It was only six in the morning, but after the blazing row the night before, Chiân’s dad had told her to run upstairs and pack everything she needed immediately. The two of them had left the house at nearly one in the morning, sleeping in the car. Chiân was tucked up under some of her new school robes. They were parked around the corner from the tube station so that Chiân’s mum couldn’t stop her going the next morning.

Her dad had assured her with fragile calm in his voice that he would be fine and that he would be able to work it out with mum. Chiân, somewhat rattled by the whole thing, had gotten on the first train into London. The sun was beginning to rise as she sped into the depths of the city.

Derek the King’s Cross security guard looked up from his coffee and spotted her approaching one of the ticket barriers. He squinted at her for a second and, had he not knocked his coffee over with his elbow, would’ve caught her surreptitious look around, would’ve seen her give the barriers a hefty kick with her doc martens and would’ve alerted somebody as she pushed her way through them. Instead Derek was swearing loudly and jumping out of his seat. It was a few minutes of napkins and huffing before Derek sat back down again.

When he looked back at the monitor the girl with the case was absolutely nowhere to be seen. Derek had forgotten all about her by breakfast.

Chiân had made it onto platform Nine and three quarters. Mr Rinstone had helpfully explained all about the invisible magical barrier during her trip round Diagon Alley.

She had been seriously doubtful at first, glancing shiftily around the mostly deserted platforms of King’s Cross Station, the air crinkly with early morning diesel smells. Then she had spotted a few train conductors on the high walkway above and figured she’d best get on with it before anyone questioned her. To her gratification it had been every bit as easy as Mr Rinstone had said, and now she was sat on her suitcase in a corner of the empty platform, shivering slightly in the morning air.

Her earphones seemed to be bugging out again. They hadn’t done this since the morning she had sat in the Leaky Cauldron trying to avoid the barman’s eye. She smacked her phone with the palm of her hand in case that helped. When it didn’t she pulled her hood up over her head, nestling back against the stone wall to zone out into the silence.

A loud noise startled her awake. Blinking her gummed-up eyes open she saw that the platform was now populated. More surprisingly, and clearly the source of the noise, was a fine looking red steam train, which was pulling to a stop in front of her. She read the name embossed handsomely on the side of the engine:

“ _Hogwarts Express_ ”

Nobody was paying much attention to her where she sat, hidden in a shadowy corner. She watched as a small gaggle of adults in uniforms greeted each other on the platform. Some of them got onto the train, a couple others dispersing back into the slight spattering of people who were beginning to congregate on the platform.

Chiân was going to check her phone but spotted a large clock hanging above the archway from which a steady trickle of people were now emerging. It was a quarter past ten.

“’Scuse me, miss, you can get on the train if you like.”

Chiân looked around at one of the chaps in uniform who had just approached her. She scrambled to her feet, feeling sheepish at being spotted. He was kind, though, and helped her lug her case onto the train. She thanked him gratefully. It was much warmer on the train, which was probably as empty right now as it would ever be.

The station guard assured her that any compartment was fine, and lifted her case for her into an overhead locker before returning to the platform. Chiân was quite groggy and full of aches from sleeping in such a series of awkward positions that night. She found herself curling up in a corner of the seats, head on the small ledge of the train window, hoodie cushioning her a little from the gentle vibrations. She tried her music again but now it was fading in and out like a radio with poor reception.

She angrily pulled the jack out of her phone, but didn’t bother removing her earphones. She settled back into the corner, sighing. Before she’d really decided to, she was asleep again.

She awoke with a jolt which belonged not to her but to the train. Without opening her eyes she knew that there were at least three other people in the compartment with her. They seemed to be paying her absolutely no attention, and that suited Chiân just fine.

From the feel of the rolling thunder beneath her, the train had just begun to move. They were pulling out of the station.

“It’s okay to cry, Theo,” said a girl’s voice, mock-earnestly.

“Fuck off,” said probably Theo back, teasingly.

“To be fair your mum looks like she’s doing enough crying for the both of you,” said another guy’s voice, sounding impressed.

Probably Theo sighed. “Yeah, she does that every year. Hates me going away for so long.”

“She gonna guilt you into going home for Christmas again?”

“Nope,” there was some rustling and grunting and Chiân figured they were stowing their luggage away. “Told her I’m going to have to stay for Quidditch practice.”

“Excellent. We’re staying too.”

“She does know that you’re not even on the Quidditch team, right?”

They chatted for a few more minutes. Chiân determined that the other boy was called Han, and the girl Becky.

“Becky, did you do that research essay about Defence Ethics for Defence Against the Dark Arts?” asked Theo.

“What, for Professor Faustus? Tell me you’ve done it, Theo.” said Becky. “You’ve had all summer!”

“Yea, I’ve done it.”

“What did you write it on?”

“Parchment,” said Theo with a smirk that was obvious even in his voice.

“Haha,” said Becky impatiently. “I wrote it on the Azkaban guards and the long-term effects of soul-leeching on prisoners.”

There was a pause.

“Bloody hell”, said Han. At the same time Theo said “Oh. I wrote it on whether the Imperious curse should be condemned legally at the same level as the other Unforgiveables.”

“That sounds fine, don’t worry.”

They debated for a few minutes. Chiân found herself suddenly opening her eyes, so intrigued by their conversation.

It was immediately obvious that Han and Becky were siblings. Han looked older than the others, but only by a year or two. Chiân was a little relieved that none of them were wearing their school robes yet either. In fact Becky was wearing what appeared to be a Legend of Zelda t-shirt.

Becky spotted her looking and nodded at her. All three students greeted her cordially and introduced themselves. Sitting up and pulling off her hood, Chiân gave her name and smiled nervously, shoving her earphones into her hoodie pocket.

“Were those things working?” Han asked her, nodding to where she’d tangled up her headphones.

“Um, no. They’ve been a bit crackly today actually.”

“I was gonna say – I’m surprised any technology would work now that we’re on the train. Too much interference.”

Theo explained to Chiân: “technology doesn’t tend to work in magic environments.”

“Except by freak chance,” added Becky.

“True – apparently the Ravenclaws have a TV in their common room. It works despite not being plugged into anything,” said Han thoughtfully

“Is that actually true?” asked Becky.

“Yep. McCauley told me. It doesn’t get very good signal and they can’t control what’s on it, so it’s kinda useless. Apparently though the portraits can enter it just like any other painting.”

“Is the Fresh Prince story true as well?”

The boys both laughed. “God, I hope so,” said Theo.

Chiân had understood very little of this. Spotting her bewilderment Han spoke. “Last year a guy brought the Fresh Prince of Bel Air DVDs into school – you know that show? Yeah, and they tried to play it on the TV and it… well it kind of worked, but the characters were like, aware of themselves and freaked out. Will Smith escaped and got into a fight with one of the portraits in the Ravenclaw common room.”

Chiân stared at him while Becky and Theo laughed.

“I have a few questions,” Chiân said over their laughter. “Namely, what the hell’s a Ravenclaw?”

Their chuckles faded. “You a first year?” asked Theo.

Chiân nodded. “How ‘bout you guys?”

“We’re just starting fifth year,” said Becky, gesturing to herself and Theo.

“Seventh and final,” said Han in a satisfied sort of voice.

The three students were in the middle of explaining the four houses to her when the compartment door slid open with a clatter.

“Hey, Shitheads,” said the guy in the doorway, a wide grin on his face.

Theo jumped up with a yell and embraced him.

“God, it’s good to see you,” said the newcomer, hugging Becky once Theo had let go of him. “How come you haven’t come to find me, hey?”

“Well, we couldn’t see you on the platform-“ started Becky.

“Just assumed you’d missed the train”, grinned Han, slapping the hand the guy had held out for him.

“Oh, uh, Oz, this is Chiân. Chiân this is Oscar. She’s a first year,” Theo added by way of explanation.

Oscar waved at her genially, “call me Ozzy." He shoved Theo closer to Chiân so he could sit down, extending his long legs to cross his feet in Becky’s lap. She rolled her eyes but grinned at him fondly.

“We were just explaining the house system.” Han gestured vaguely at Chiân who was feeling surprisingly at home with them all.

“Aha,” Ozzy said wisely. “Here’s what you need to know: Gryffindor is full of twats who think they are better than everyone else, Ravenclaw is full of twats who are actually better than everyone else, Hufflepuff is where you go for weed, and don’t be in Slytherin.”

“What house are you guys in?” Chiân asked.

“Gryffindor,” they all said in unison.

Ozzy grinned. “Case in point,” he gestured grandly around and everyone laughed.

“And why is Slytherin so bad?”

The others all made noises, looking dramatically at each other. Chiân’s interest was piqued.

“Bunch of evil bastards,” said Theo, then spotted Becky’s raised eyebrow. “Historically speaking, of course.”

Ozzy had settled further down into his seat, almost lying in Theo’s lap. Theo was stroking his hair fondly. Chiân wondered if they were a couple. Ozzy laced his fingers across his chest contentedly and said to Chiân “they’re not all that bad anymore, but like, all the worst people have usually been Slytherins. Historically speaking.”

Excitedly talking over each other, the four older students told her stories about Wizards so evil their very names were unspeakable, about dark magic and impossible babies who survived murder curses. Old myths about snakes and secret chambers, about soul-splitting acts of violence and battles which shook the castle of Hogwarts to its very foundations.

Chiân listened, enraptured, asking question after question, laughing along with the rest at Theo and Ozzy’s rude jests at the other’s expense.

“So wait – wait, what was his name again?”

“He Who Must Not Be Named?”

“Yeah,” said Chiân, possibly too keenly.

Han looked a little serious for a moment. “Well, his real name was, uh, Voldemort, but like, lowkey don’t use that name. Freaks people out.”

“Still? Wow,” said Chiân, marvelling at the idea of a wizard so formidable that long after his death people still feared him. “He must have been incredibly powerful.”

Ozzy snorted at the mistiness in her voice. “Watch out, Chiân, or you’re gonna end up in Slytherin.”

“Which would be fine,” added Becky in a slightly stern voice. She looked at Chiân. “They’re not evil – just traditional in some ways which can attract like, well-“

“Bigots?” suggested Han helpfully. Becky rolled her eyes.

“Nah, to be fair they’ve mellowed out loads. They mostly just keep themselves to themselves nowadays,” said Ozzy.

Chiân frowned. “If there were so many evil ones back in the day, why didn’t people like, try to get into Slytherin?”

Becky cocked her head. “Don’t you mean try not to?”

“No, I mean like, infiltrate – get on the inside and, y'know… try to change them.” She tailed off, embarrassed.

“Big ideas for a squid so small,” quipped Ozzy, sitting up a little.

“To be fair,” said Theo thoughtfully, picking at his chin, “it must fuck you up a little. You arrive at age, like, what are you, ten?” he shot at Chiân playfully, who smirked at him. “And you get told by this fucking _hat_ that you’re the same kind of person as You Know Who and you should go live in a dungeon.”

“The common room isn’t actually a dungeon you know,” said Becky, rolling her eyes again. “It’s actually kind of cool. They have a massive window into the lake and a lot of plants.”

Han gaped at her. “You’ve been in the Slytherin common room?”

“Yes, only once-“

“Oh yeah, I forgot you’re friends with those kids from choir, the – what are their names?”

“Charlotte and Prince.”

Ozzy addressed Chiân again. “Well, if you want to get up into that particular snake hole and do some good, go for it. They probably need all the help they can get. Sorry bastards.”

“Especially if you can fly.”

“Oh God, yeah. Their team is gonna be appallingly bad now that Fredrickson and Beck have left,” said Han.

“Laughable,” agreed Theo with amused pity in his voice.

The conversation turned to Quidditch, about which Chiân also had many questions, but she retreated a little into staring out the window.

She was preoccupied by what she had just been told. The image of a giant snake in a secret underground hall was vivid in her mind. She wasn’t much fond of snakes, and didn’t particularly feel partial to green – Ozzy had joked that the real deciding quality was which house colour best matched one’s skin tone. And yet she couldn’t shake the feeling that Slytherin was exactly where she was supposed to be.

She didn’t voice this, though, reluctant to invite any outrage or criticism from these students who were being so nice to her.

She watched the countryside race by. Unbidden, her mother’s voice came ripping up through her memory, screaming the word ‘monster’ over and over again into her face. Chiân wondered coolly if it was a sign of low self-esteem to pick a Hogwarts house according to the hang-ups your shitty parents had given you.

A sad thought as old as she could remember surfaced in her mind. The thing was, Chiân wasn’t sure that she _wasn’t_ a monster. That dust from the ceiling seemed to fall behind her eyes and she sighed quietly. She hadn’t understood what the Gryffindors had meant by a ‘hat’, but she figured that the teachers at Hogwarts probably had a better grasp of how to sort new students than she could guess at. She’d end up in the right place one way or another.

A little while later Theo stood up and announced that he had to go to the front of the train.

“Oh I forgot, you’re a prefect now-“

“My perfect boy,” said Ozzy, mock weeping and placing his hands over his heart as Theo blew him a kiss and departed. Becky laughed.

“I might go find Hannah and them, if that’s alright with you,” said Becky, also getting up to leave. She nodded to Chiân, “good to meet you, and see you when we get off the train – or at the feast or something. Good luck!” She smiled kindly and Chiân smiled back.

Han and Ozzy chatted for a few more minutes, mentioning to Chiân that she should probably get into her school robes sometime before they arrived in Hogsmeade. A very boisterous group of students came and claimed Ozzy a few moments later, and Han also waved goodbye to Chiân to go find his friends.

Chiân was alone once more.

The sun was beginning to sag in the sky already. She figured this was as good a time as any to change into her robes. She felt kind of stupid in them, but a couple girls raced past the compartment in their uniforms and she calmed down a little, trying to remember that she would look a whole lot stupider if she was the only one in black jeans and a Tyler the Creator hoodie. She kept her doc martens on beneath her robes and this, along with the wand tucked into the inside pocket, made her feel a little better.

The others popped back in one by one, sometimes with friends, to get their robes, and Chiân was introduced to a lot of smiling people whose names she did not try to retain. Many of them wished her luck, and a few cracked jokes warning her to avoid being sorted into Slytherin. Not long afterwards the train began to slow, chuffing into a quaint, rural train station.

Chiân nearly knocked herself flat trying to pull her case off the ledge at the top. She sat perched on it again, waiting for the crush of students outside the compartment door to subside. Pushing out into the corridor at last, Chiân dragged her case to the door and out onto the platform.

Amidst the hectic confusion she could hear a voice calling “First years this way! First years to me, please”.

Chiân paused so that a gang of loudly laughing older students could pass her. She shoved and shunted her suitcase to the gathering cluster of much younger looking Hogwarts students. She noticed a queue of carriages just beyond the end of the platform.

She started when she realised that the teacher who had been yelling for the first years was addressing her.

“What?”

“I said, you can leave that here. Luggage will be taken directly up to the castle.” The woman gestured at her case and Chiân suppressed a blush. She wasn’t only one who had made this mistake though and a few from the first year huddle shuffled around to make a small pile of luggage in a corner. Chiân eyed it with distrust, reluctant to leave her belongings, but turned and followed the rest as they began to walk.

The snake of nervous first years passed right alongside the carriages and older students, many of whom were still greeting each other, not exactly rushing to get going.

Chiân slowed to an awed stop, staring at what was harnessed to the carriages.

Forgetting the woman leading the first years, Chiân stepped forwards as if she was in a trance. They weren’t horses, as it had looked from a distance, though they were a similar shape and build. Chiân had assumed that the deep obsidian gleam of their flanks had been hair, and the wings some extravagant decoration. Only a few feet away, she realised that they were scaled, and the wings were definitely real.

Chiân was entranced. The creatures were skeletally thin and had eyes of blank white which they blinked at her as she stepped forward. She approached the one nearest to her, reaching out a hand and murmuring instinctively. The animal was watching her – not nervously, but with patient politeness.

It was not the only one watching her. As Chiân touched the animal’s oddly shaped, almost reptilian head, a smile spread over her face. The students who had been climbing into the carriage beside her had fallen quiet, but she did not look up as she noticed this, still intent upon the horse-like creature whose wings trembled and stretched a little as she scratched behind its ear.

One of the students had nudged her friends. After a moment she spoke. “Hey.”

“Hey,” said Chiân back, sparing her a glance.

“So, you can see the thestrals, then?” She girl approached her. She was tall and brown skinned, with blue trimmings to her uniform. The other students gathered a little behind the speaker.

“What?” Chiân registered the strangeness of the question and turned properly.

“The thestrals,” the girl pointed at the horse-creature. “Not everyone can see them.”

“None of us can,” added a guy behind her. “Come on, Shanti, everyone else is leaving,” he added to the girl and got into the carriage. The others began to follow.

“You a first year?” Shanti said to Chiân, who nodded. “I’m Shanti, sixth year.” The girl held out her hand and Chiân, after a moment, took it.

“Chiân.”

“Nice to meet you, Chiân,” Shanti smiled – not with warmth, but with something more like clinical interest. Then she added “you’re losing your year by the way,” and nodded out into the lowering evening.

Chiân barely spotted the shrinking back of the first year line and had to run for a minute or two to catch them up. She was preoccupied with the apparent invisibility of the scaled horses.

The first years at the back of the procession smiled nervously at her when they heard her running up, but she did not speak to them.

They reached a vast, navy-blue lake which rippled in a similar way to the sleek backs of the not-horses – what had been the word? Thestrals. Under the direction of the woman they all clambered into the fleet of boats clustered around the pier, the braver students stepping over the wobbling boats to reach the ones further out.

Chiân was again last, and introduced herself to the other three students in her boat as they all exchanged names. There was a girl named Vesper who had very pale, almost silvery hair down to her waist, another called Keira, and a boy named Max who Chiân thought she recognised from her trip to Diagon Alley. None of them gasped when the boats began to move of their own accord, though many of the others did.

The sun was setting magnificently next to the castle as they approached the far shore. Against the foot of the rocks from which so many turrets rose, the deep purples and golds of the dusk lapped like waves.

The boats glided into a small cave at the base of the castle, where the first years climbed out onto a path. They followed the woman up through a grand archway and a twisting flight of stone steps until they came out into a warmly lit antechamber. It was a few more minutes before another staff member in deep red robes came out and addressed them.

“Good evening and welcome,” she said, stretching out her arms impressively, “to Hogwarts school of Witchcraft and Wizardy”.

The first years all seemed to swell slightly with the sense of mystery and power in her voice. Chiân decided immediately that she liked her.

“I am Professor Chancery, deputy headmaster, and I am here to take you into the Great Hall.” She gestured to the door just behind her, her long, dramatic sleeves billowing with her movements. “As some of you may know, Hogwarts students are sorted upon arrival into four houses: Gryffindor, Slytherin, Hufflepuff, and Ravenclaw. These houses are a ceremonial grouping and you will belong to yours for the duration of your time here, sleeping, learning, and living in your respective dormitories, lesson groups, and common rooms.”

The first years were all murmuring excitedly. A few of the bolder students who were already initiated in these matters were making important stage whispers to their friends about which house was best.

Professor Chancery held her hands out and demanded silence once more. “You will be sorted in just a few moments, by the sorting hat. You will each in turn take your place on the stool at the top of the hall, and the hat shall decide where you will go. This will happen in front of the rest of the school, so that you may immediately join your new houses for the feast, which will happen directly afterwards. Please do not be alarmed or embarrassed: there is no right or wrong way to be sorted, no matter where you are placed.”

A wry grin graced her face for a second, and Chiân wondered if it had anything to do with the frowns of disagreement a few of the students were showing. She appreciated Professor Chancery’s reassurances though, as did many other first years. The nerves were beginning to mount.

Vesper leant in to Chiân and said quietly, “what do _you_ think of Slytherin?” Her tone made it sound like there was a right and wrong answer. Not wanting to parse opinions so early, Chiân merely shrugged.

There wasn’t time for follow-up as Professor Chancery, at some unseen cue, ordered them into a neat line. She and the woman who had led them across the lake quieted the students as they jostled each other. Then, with a sweep of her rich red robes, Professor Chancery pushed wide the doors.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> An audio recording of this chapter can be found here:
> 
> https://soundcloud.com/kristin-briggs/chapter-two-trains-boats-and/s-7Y6l6qT41fq?in=kristin-briggs/sets/firebug-book-i-chian-maeroris-and-the-secret-library-of-fire/s-Ikj2jpymg6t


	3. A Sort of Sorts

Chiân’s first impression of Hogwarts’ Great Hall was one of towering stone and astonishing colour. The sky above the long tables was displaying the final moments of the same glorious sunset they had seen across the lake. There did not appear to be a ceiling.

Many of the first years gasped and whispered, staring upwards and stumbling into each other as they followed Professor Chancery to the front of the hall. The golds and purples reminded Chiân of watching Mr Wiseman create her wand. She smiled to herself, feeling it in her robe pocket.

The hall was full of students in black robes, and Chiân could see the hints of colour in each uniform which marked the different houses. She looked up and down the long tables and spotted Ozzy and Theo, then Becky with her friends a little further down. They each waved to her cheerfully, attracting sidelong glances from the surrounding students and a few of the first years.

Along the top of the hall was a table on a raised dais, and Chiân guessed that the people there must be the teachers. If it weren’t for the glory of the open sky above them this assortment of witches and wizards would have seemed impressively colourful. Professor Chancery’s rich red and silver garments looked well-matched by an array of royal purples, emerald greens, dark and light blues, and a bravely yellow sort of cape, draped around the shoulders of a short and very fat grey-haired wizard.

The polite applause at the first years’ entrance had died down, and the man in the centre of the head table was rising to his feet.

“Welcome,” he said, surveying the first years. Chiân thought he looked a little like Bill Nye, though this may have been because he, unlike the rest of the staff, was dressed in a reasonably normal grey suit. “I am Professor Petrarch, Headmaster here at Hogwarts, and it is my honour and delight to announce the imminent commencement,” he paused dramatically, “of your sorting.”

He swept his arm towards a stool at the front of the dais. On it was a hat. A very, very old hat.

Almost every eye was turned attentively towards it, except those of Chiân and a few other first years who were glancing around furtively, wondering what was about to happen.

And then the hat… sang.

“ _Welcome, boys and girls and kin_

_And hark as I my song begin._

_It is that time of year once more_

_To tell you of these Houses four:_

_Of Red and Green, Yellow and Blue,_

_And which will be the right for you,_

_During your time at Hogwarts school_

_to learn within these hallowed halls._

_Perhaps you value what is good,_

_And always strive for what you should?_

_A Hufflepuff you may well be,_

_Most treasuring of loyalty._

_Or yet a Ravenclaw instead,_

_Where you will learn to use your head._

_If brains and wisdom are your pride_

_Then here your mind is rightly tried._

_But possibly you value heart,_

_And courage in your every part?_

_With Gryffindors, of noble kin,_

_May be the place where you fit in._

_And those who strive in ceaseless toil_

_Towards better selves from troubled soil,_

_In Slytherin may find their home,_

_A place of rest from which to roam._

_Each of these Houses is so called_

_After the Witch or Wizard bold_

_Who many centuries ago_

_Helped found the Hogwarts you now know._

_A vision shared in unity_

_Did these four uphold dutifully._

_Remember as I sort you now_

_That different labels yet allow_

_You friends to have and make and keep_

_No matter colour, race, or creed._

_Take pride, young students, where you can,_

_No matter where it is you land._

_Now put me on and let me see_

_What you’re made of, and where you’ll be!”_

Applause rose up from the students and teachers. The first years scrambled to get over their shock and join in, a little bewildered. Chiân thought that somehow, despite being a hat, the Sorting Hat was managing to look very pleased with itself.

Professor Chancery was unfurling a large scroll, and then, with a loud “Belford, Jonathan,” the sorting ceremony began.

Jonathan Belford was a Ravenclaw, followed by two Hufflepuff students, a Gryffindor, and another Ravenclaw. The first Slytherin was a tall kid named Calix Dufay, who looked very solemn but slightly pleased as he put the hat back on the stool and made his way to the far table. Chiân thought that the cheering and applause was a little subdued for him.

Chiân’s chest got tighter as they approached the ‘M’s.

Then,

“Maeroris, Chiân”.

Somebody – probably Ozzy – wolfwhistled, and she grinned in spite of the boa constrictor-type tension in her chest.

She nearly tripped on the dais, and lifted the hat with a trembling hand, turning to see hundreds of faces as she sat. She jammed the hat on her head with grim, almost defiant force.

The voice of the Sorting Hat was greeting her as she pushed the brim out of her vision, staring out across the students.

“Hello, Miss Maeroris. Now, how are we feeling…” The hat was speaking right into her ear, almost inside her head.

This seemed a rhetorical question and the hat gave a “Hmm” at her lack of response. She found herself staring across the hall to the Slytherin table, the green and silver banners seeming modest against the bold Blues, Yellows and Reds. It was the longest way from where she sat now.

The Sorting Hat laughed before pronouncing Chiân Maeroris a Slytherin. Chiân did not realise that the chuckle she had heard in her ear had also been witnessed by everyone else in the Great Hall, but the strength and certainty with which the Hat declared her house made something like pride swell in her chest.

She stood up and removed the hat, and found that she was grinning. She stepped off the dais with her head held high. The general applause was polite, except for – to much bemusement from the other tables – a certain few Gryffindor fifth years who hollered at her, for some reason, as she passed their table.

She met Ozzy’s eyes and snickered as he flipped her off with a low hand and a wry grin.

The next name was called out as she approached the table. Two older girls smiled to her and gestured to an empty stretch of bench beside them.

There were five more Slytherins from the remaining first years, including Vesper Willoughby, who came and sat opposite Chiân, looking pleased. Max and Keira, their other boat-mates, had been sorted into Gryffindor and Hufflepuff respectively. Vesper, who had already introduced herself as ‘Vessy’ to the students around them, had been the third-to-last student to be sorted. As the last name was called and the applause died away, Professor Chancery left the hall with the stool and hat. All in all only seven of the forty-something first years had been put in Slytherin, and that was perfectly okay with Chiân.

The headmaster rose once more, and announced the feast.

Barely had he spoken the words when, to great enthusiasm and chatter, the long tables suddenly sagged with food.

Chiân gaped around her for a full minute before copying everyone else and helping herself to a bit of everything. The feast was delicious. Chiân’s mother was a reasonable cook when she tried, but was usually too busy or working too late, like her dad. Chiân had made herself a lot of beans on toast in her time, and she felt her throat close up a little at the thought that she wouldn’t have to cook for herself again all year.

The Slytherins around her and Vessy introduced themselves. The two girls who had offered Chiân a seat were third years: Kaitlin and Dreya. Next to Vessy was a guy called Alec and on the other side a group of sixth and seventh years who seemed pretty disinterested in the newcomers. One stocky girl had an entirely shaved head and a nose ring. She had her arm around a girl with bright pink hair and a deep burn scar across the left side of her face.

“She’s blind in that eye,” said Dreya, leaning across to Chiân when she spotted her looking. “And yeah, they’re a couple.”

“Lesbian power-couple,” chuckled Alec, who had already finished his enormous plate of food and was taking a small flask out of his robe. He glanced around before pouring it into his goblet of what Chiân had been told was pumpkin juice.

“Pre-drinking already, Cortez?” said Kaitlin.

“There’s alcohol here?” said Vessy with poorly-feigned nonchalance. Chiân thought she was trying a little hard.

Kaitlin shrugged. “If you know where to get it.” Dreya nudged her as if to say ‘shut up’, but grinned quickly at Chiân when she saw that she’d noticed.

Just as Chiân was regretting the size of the potato she had just put into her mouth, the walls seemed to light up with silver mist. The ghosts had arrived.

Chiân’s mouth fell open, though this was partially due to the very hot potato in her mouth. Spitting it out unabashedly and taking a gulp of cool pumpkin juice, she swivelled around on the bench to stare up at the ghosts.

She watched as many of the students waved up at them like they were old friends. Some of the ghosts settled in between students to join in the evening’s summer catch-up. There were men and women – and the occasional indeterminable figure without a head or other discernible aspects – in all kinds of historical outfits – regency dress, plain habits and servants’ garments, crinoline dresses, modern trousers, suits, court jester hats, and even the odd school uniform.

“They always show off on the first night,” said Dreya, as if this might lessen the impressive effect the horde of the undead was having upon Chiân.

In a daze, her tongue still burning, Chiân tuned out of the chatter on the table and found herself standing up.

One of the ghosts saw her staring and winked. It was a woman, with long grey hair and a ragged dress. Her bare feet were barely perceptible, trailing off to intermingle with the candle smoke which was drifting around the tables. In wonder, Chiân turned on the spot. As she gazed up she realised that there was in fact a ceiling – it just seemed to be made of glass, or something very transparent. The sky above was now an impenetrable sea of black, enveloping the rosy glow of the hall round her as the light rose, unhindered, out into the night.

“Hello, Baron,” said a slightly stiff Kaitlin behind her. Chiân turned back to the table in time to see a particularly bright ghost rise up through the floor just beside the Slytherin table. It took her a second to realise that he was a brighter silver because he was covered in ghostly blood. His face was sombre and his eyes almost completely translucent. It reminded her of the thestrals.

“Good morrow,” he said in a slow, sonorous way. Vessy had gone complimentarily pale and shifted slightly towards Alec. The Baron slid into the space next to her.

Still standing, Chiân greeted him enthusiastically. “Hi, I’m Chiân. You’re a Baron?”

He stared at her, then nodded.

“Dope. How did you die?”

Ghosts, apparently, could raise their eyebrows. Dreya shifted uncomfortably in the pause.

“Old age,” he said eventually, his voice as soaked in sarcasm as his body was in silver-white blood.

Chiân laughed and slid back into her seat. “How do you become a ghost?”

The Baron seemed to sigh without making a noise, and replied “you choose the devil you know, I suppose.”

This struck Chiân as an evasive answer, but before she could follow up, Vessy had cut in with a question about living quarters, and the conversation veered away. Chiân noticed that the Baron continued to watch her until the end of the feast.

Professor Petrarch was once more standing, and just as suddenly as it had appeared, the food vanished. The students settled back and turned towards their headmaster.

“I trust you are all replete,” he said mildly. “It is a delight to welcome in the new year with all you fine young people. As your teachers and mentors we are all excited to walk with you through the challenges and adventures you will face here at Hogwarts school.”

Some of the older students were still chatting quietly. Chiân figured this must be fairly standard fare for a start-of-year talk.

“For the benefit of our newest, I will take this opportunity to briefly mention a few of the more pressing rules of life about the castle. For your full perusal however, a small welcome pack including our Complete School Rules and a map of the Castle and grounds will be waiting for each first year in your respective chambers.” He paused, “any older students who… decide they might like to re-acquaint themselves with our codes of conduct can request a copy from our caretakers, Mr and Mrs Bruch.”

He gestured to a man and woman who were stood on either side of the main doors. They nodded out to the students as heads turned towards them. Their posture was almost military, and they were wearing faded black cloaks over what seemed to be utility jumpsuits. They looked very capable, thought Chiân.

“The Forbidden Forest is out of bounds to all students – unless you are on a specific errand for, and are accompanied by, a trained member of staff from Rubeus House and Gardens.” He looked stern for a moment. “The Rubeus House and Gardens are, as many of you know, open to students between the hours of nine am and six pm each Saturday. All and any of you are welcome during these hours to explore and engage with the rare creatures and specimens of plant life that are cared for there. It is essential, however, that you do not go beyond the demarcated areas of the gardens and do not enter the facility out of hours. Though under rigorous supervision and care, the creatures in our sanctuary are not tame, and many of the plants can also pose a very real danger.”

He paused, and Alec whispered to her and Vessy, “a girl died there a few years back.”

“What?” Vessy was alarmed.

“Yeah. Some fourth years went in one night as a dare and she got attacked by a manticore.”

“Fucking hell,” Vessy whispered and he nodded solemnly. Chiân had no idea what a manticore was.

“Curfew for first years is eight pm, Monday through Friday-“ there was some bristling indignation “-from the grounds and castle only, and nine o’clock on weekends. You may socialise and remain very much awake in your House common rooms, however, until half past ten, when you are encouraged to go to bed.” His eyes crinkled fondly as if recognising how foolish it was to hope for this.

“Second, third and fourth years, you may roam beyond your common rooms up until nine thirty, and ten at weekends. Fifth through seventh years your curfew is eleven, as you should well know by now,” Chiân noticed that he seemed to be specifically directing this at the Gryffindor table. “And all of you should be in your dormitories by midnight.”

Chiân grinned, imagining anybody trying to tell Ozzy or Theo to go to bed.

“Repeated violations of curfew will result in increasingly severe penalties, as will failure to do homework, unaccounted absences from lessons, and, er,” he was frowning at the notes in front of him, then looked back up, “unicorn transmissions.”

Professor Chancery, who was sat on his right hand side, leant over to peer at the notes, then chuckled something to him.

“Aha, thank you Gwen. Uniform transgressions,” he corrected himself, smiling. Chiân though he must be somewhat absent minded. He did look pretty old.

“Lastly, first years are not permitted to try out for the House Quidditch teams. This is for your own safety. There will, however, be optional extra-curricular flying lessons once a week for those of you wishing to, ahem, test your wings.”

Chiân recalled the Gryffindors on the train and the way they had enthused almost obsessively about flying and broomsticks. She couldn’t picture any version of this in her head that didn’t look deeply ridiculous.

“Now,” the hall fell quiet again. “First years, you will need to rise bright and early tomorrow for your orientation. I suggest waking at seven, although I do like a quiet morning coffee,” he added absently, almost to himself. “Please meet your Heads of Houses in the Entrance Hall at half past eight for your orientations.”

Chiân was just wondering who their Head of House was when he said “If you remain in your seats for a few minutes more, your Heads of Houses will show you to your common rooms when the corridors are less, er, busy.”

He clapped his hands. Most students were already preparing themselves. “To the rest of you, I release you now to make merry in an appropriate and sensible fashion-“ he was raising his voice as benches scraped and voices babbled. “-good evening to all of you, and welcome back!”

Nobody was listening. The hall was full of students shoving towards the door, and a spattering of first years twisting nervously in their seats. Some of them were shuffling up towards each other as the room emptied out.

Kaitlin clapped Chiân’s shoulder as she and Dreya extricated themselves. “See you in a minute,” she said, and Dreya winked at her.

The other first year Slytherins came and joined them.

It was obvious now how few of them there had been, proportional to the other houses. Still, Chiân thought they looked like a promising bunch, as potential friends went.

Calix was bright-eyed and sharp-tongued, and shared Vessy’s quality of wanting to seem slightly taller than he actually was. There was a weedy looking boy called Egan, who looked very anxious indeed, a shrewd strawberry-blonde girl named Lydia, and two other boys whose names Chiân didn’t have time to catch before their Head of House reached them.

The main thing Chiân noticed about him as he introduced himself to them was that Professor Wexel looked deeply tired. It reminded her a little of her dad – the stale smiles and pre-occupied jolts in how he spoke. He was describing points systems and etiquette, bathroom placements and laundry protocol to them as they left the Great Hall.

He seemed nice enough, though a little distant. He was wearing robes of forest green which looked as though they were probably older than Chiân. They crossed the entrance hall and went down a passage which sloped gently in the torch light. Professor Wexel’s robes seemed to ripple into shadows in the low lighting.

“Excuse me, um, sir,” said Lydia, pressing to the front of their small procession.

“Yes?”

“Why doesn’t Hogwarts use electricity?” she asked, gesturing to the flickering torches they were passing, going steadily downwards.

Professor Wexel smiled a little. “Every year a student asks me that. I do hope none of you bought your laptops and iPods and other such gadgets,” he looked around at them, and Chiân was not the only one looking disgruntled. “We really ought to start putting it in the letters.”

He addressed them all. “Magic is a tangible, almost living thing, you know. It affects everything it comes into contact with. When directed in a spell it can be channelled to perform a… specific act, I suppose. That’s the type of thing you will learn in Transfiguration, or Charms lessons with myself. But it is not merely wand-work. There are many substances and… fabrics of magical quality, and I suppose they are… incompatible with non-magic machinery of any kind.”

Egan was scowling at these words, and Chiân silently agreed that this was bad news. She wasn’t sure how she was going to get by without Spotify.

“So there’s no wifi then?” asked Calix.

Professor Wexel actually chuckled at this, but did not answer, instead halting them with a raised hand. “Remember this, please, or you will get lost. Frequently.”

They were at a small sort of crossroads. Including the corridor they had just walked down there were five mouths to the room, two of which were staircases. Professor Wexel pointed out the second path to the left, then led them down it. He warned that although they would have maps, the sheer size of the place could prove very hostile to the inattentive student.

They seemed to be walking an impossibly long way into the heart of the Castle. Chiân was just beginning to despair of ever being able to remember the path when they stopped in a seemingly unremarkable stretch of flickering stonework corridor.

“The password for this term is ‘Slughorn’,” Professor Wexel said clearly, and indicated to Lydia that she should approach the completely banal stretch of wall before her.

“Um,” she said, glancing around shiftily. There was a long pause. It seemed that Lydia was too embarrassed to say this word into a wall.

Chiân tried not to roll her eyes, and loudly said from behind her, “Slughorn.”

All of them except Chiân, Vessy, and Professor Wexel jumped as the stone wall seemed to ripple in front of them, as if it had been curtains all along and was very clever for fooling them so excellently.

“I will say my goodbyes here. See you all at breakfast tomorrow morning.” He vanished into the darkness of the corridor.

Chiân looked around her at the other first years and internally sighed. Sure, the Sorting Hat had attributed bravery to Gryffindors, but it’s not like the other houses weren’t allowed to show a little spirit.

“Come on,” she said, and, pretending her teeth weren’t clenched, stepped through the wall.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> An audio recording of this chapter can be found here:
> 
> https://soundcloud.com/kristin-briggs/chapter-three-a-sort-of-sorts-audio-recording/s-B9pmhlpJYGY?in=kristin-briggs/sets/firebug-book-i-chian-maeroris-and-the-secret-library-of-fire/s-Ikj2jpymg6t


	4. Libations and Limitations

The following week was some of the most fun Chiân could ever remember having.

The Slytherins all called the first week of school term ‘Libation week’, though nobody seemed to know why. Libation week involved light hazing for the first years and a lot of drinking for the older students. It also involved plenty of dares, such as excursions to the school kitchens in the middle of the night, and trying to get into one of the other common rooms incognito and return with a trophy to prove it.

Chiân made something of a name for herself with this last challenge, which she won definitively. She found Oscar and Theo during lunch on Tuesday and told them about the dare. As she had guessed they would they had both thought it inordinately funny and agreed to help her pull it off. After dinner that night, to good-natured jeering from the other Slytherins, she had made a show of following the Gryffindors out of the hall. She winked to her fellow first years, who were looking on appreciatively.

Ozzy’s friend Alex looked back at her from the top of a staircase she hadn’t yet been up, caught her eye and yelled, “If you want it, you gotta work for it.” As one, he, Ozzy, Theo and the others burst into a sprint. Clearly they had planned this.

Chiân yelled in protest and chased them up the stairs, only to find that the staircase was moving away from the landing above. Without thinking Chiân ran to the top and jumped, just as the staircase turned away from the marble floor. She made the leap by inches and tumbled onto the stone.

She gave an uncomfortable whoosh of breath and stumbled over her robes as she got to her feet. She turned to look at the sheer drop behind her. The staircase was now pointing to a completely different corridor. Another staircase was swinging out to meet her.

Several Slytherins and a few curious Ravenclaws were watching her and laughing from the hallway below. Giving them a swift grin, Chiân turned around and ran in pursuit of the Gryffindors.

The Gryffindor fifth years were waiting for her at the other end of the corridor – or at least, Ozzy, a tall girl called Mia, and Becky’s friend Hannah were, smiling at her. She jogged up to them, about to thank them for waiting, before they took off again, laughing, each running in a different direction.

The chase through the castle was hugely enjoyable, and memorable for several reasons. One of them was the moment when Chiân had run smack into Mr Bruch, who had raised his voice to shout something at her. She had tumbled backwards to the floor though, and rolled out of the way as he reached down to grab her. Expecting to feel the wall behind her and use it to scramble to her feet, Chiân had heaved herself accidentally into a tapestry that seemed to conceal a secret doorway. It gave way as she fell backwards into a dark stairwell. In the abruptness of the fall her instincts made her throw out her arms, and a cushion of magic brought her to a halt just above the stone steps at the bottom.

She had dropped down into a crouch, blinking a little, before stepping through an old, faded red curtain and out into a completely different corridor. Ozzy and Becky were walking down it, and she had caught up to them and followed them for a good two minutes before they noticed her.

They chased each other all the way up to Gryffindor tower, taking what Chiân was sure was a ridiculously long route. She got her feet stuck in some nasty, quicksand-like sinking steps twice and the second time had to pull herself out on her own because the others had already vanished through yet another tapestry.

Several times a teacher had barked at them to stop running, but did not bother to pursue when they ignored it. Chiân ran headlong into a ghost at one point and had given a yelp at the unpleasant, icy feeling it gave her. The ghost had seemed rather offended, but Chiân could see the staircase ahead of her beginning to move, and had run off again, apologising vaguely over her shoulder.

After nearly half an hour and a very bad stitch, Chiân realised that she had finally lost them. Heaving for breath, Chiân slowed to a stop at the end of a wide, brightly-lit corridor. Hands on her knees, she gazed up at a large painting in front of her. She had been sure that the Gryffindors had come this way, but the only thing here was this picture of a fat woman in Victorian dress. The fat lady in the portrait eyed her with a shrewd expression of disapproval.

“I suppose, seeing as you are dressed in Slytherin robes, that I needn’t bother asking you for the password,” the fat lady said sniffily.

Chiân had known from her conversations on the train that the pictures at Hogwarts moved, but it was still quite something to be addressed by one. Still catching her breath, Chiân straightened up and held up a finger. She still didn’t have enough breath to speak.

Just as she made to ask the woman what she meant by password, the portrait swung forward, revealing a sizeable hole in the wall. Peering through was Theo, and he was grinning.

She spent at least an hour in the Gryffindor common room, which was not nearly as ornate as the Slytherin one, though just as comfortable. She waved to all the first years she shared classes with and tried to explain why she was on such good terms with so many of the older students.

“She’s our spy,” said Becky to the other first years.

A girl named Belinda Wells eyed her suspiciously. “Isn’t she a Slytherin?” she’d said to her friend, not quite quietly enough.

“Exactly,” said Theo cheerfully, right behind her. Belinda and her friend jumped. “She can give us all the dirt.”

“Forwarn us of evil uprisings, murderously villainous OWL students, that sort of thing,” said Ozzy cheerfully. He was again lying in one of his friend’s laps – this time Alex, and Becky laughed at Chiân’s curious glance.

“Oz is very touchy-feely,” she said.

“Nope,” said Oz happily, reaching up to pat Alex’s face and successfully poking him in the eye by accident. “Just in love.”

Some of the sixth years had come over to see why a Slytherin girl was hanging around in their common room. The whole group went into uproar when she explained the nature of her mission - to get into another house’s common room and take back some artefact of proof.

“That’s brilliant-“

“Why don’t we do hazes?”

“Oh my god we should have an initiation week-“

“I’ll haze you, Norton-“

They had begun arguing very loudly about the funniest item to make Chiân carry down seventeen floors when the portrait hole opened. Professor Chancery swept in, looking ethereal.

Almost in unison the Gryffindors shoved Chiân under one of the coffee tables. Ozzy rolled off of Alex’s lap and onto the ground, lying nonchalantly across the floor in front of her.

“Evening, prof,” called one of the Sixth years, while the second years giggled.

Professor Chancery didn’t seem to see anything awry, and notified them all that the Quidditch pitch had been booked for their team tryouts that Friday. There were many whoops and Chiân took the opportunity to cough the carpet dust out of her lungs.

Calling goodnight to their Head of House, the students waited barely a second after she’d gone to roar with laughter. Becky and Mia helped her get out from under the coffee table, brushing dust off her.

Enjoying herself immensely, Chiân demanded offerings, and the hunt for a suitable item began.

Theo thought she should take one of the armchairs, which he then had to explain had been a joke when Hannah pointed out that it was far too large.

“I could, though!” Chiân said. “Do you know how much alcohol the Slytherin sixth years have smuggled into the castle by transfiguring it into shampoo? I could just,” she glanced around at the chairs as if sizing them up, “transfigure it into something really small.”

A lot of people laughed.

“There’s no way, mate”

“You’re a first year”

“Yeah? So?”

One of the third years chuckled. “I couldn’t transfigure a matchstick for most of my first year.”

“And incredibly you still can’t, Gareth,” said the girl next to him.

Chiân frowned, and was about to suggest that they let her try when Ozzy jumped into the air.

“Eurethra!” he yelled.

Hannah covered her face with her hand. “It’s ‘eureka’, Oscar.”

But he had hopped to the other side of the room, up to a large stone bust of an impressive-looking wizard in round glasses. He had a neatly shaved beard and a shape which looked like a lightning bolt carved into his bronzey forehead.

“Oh God-“

“Oz, you’re gonna drop it-“

“Oscar!”

Several people rushed forwards – not to force the bust back onto its plinth, but to help him wriggle it off.

Three of them carried it over to Chiân, excitedly explaining that it was a bust of a wizard named ‘Harry Potter’ – one of the most famous Gryffindors who ever lived.

“That’s not much better than a chair, though,” pointed out a girl who was sprawled out on one of the rugs with her knitting. “In fact in terms of weight it’s probably worse.” She looked like she might be related to Ozzy. Then he aimed a kick at her and she flipped him off in return, and Chiân decided she was definitely related to Ozzy.

“I can manage that,” said Chiân without a trace of self-doubt. She rolled up her sleeves and tucked her wand through her ponytail. Concentrating very hard, Chiân reached out a hand towards the statue and before any of the Gryffindors could anticipate what was about to happen, the statue lifted out of the boys’ hands and floated towards Chiân.

A thick silence filled the room. Chiân didn’t notice. She was too busy not dropping the statue on anyone, piercing it with her eyes and clenching every muscle in her stomach and arms to channel that precarious, wild movement inside her into supporting the statue. She had done this a lot at home, though never in front of anybody before, admittedly. One time she had moved a car halfway down the street from her bedroom window – the alarm had been going off for two straight hours and she decided to do something about it. She had been eight.

“Um,” said Becky.

“Could someone get the portrait for me?” said Chiân, making her way through the students. They rolled or stepped out of her way, staring at her. “This is perfect, thanks.”

She turned when the silence continued, and met many pairs of eyes. “What?”

There was a long pause, in which Theo and Oz looked like they were about to explode.

“Oh,” said Chiân, misinterpreting their astonishment for concern. “I’ll get it back to you in one piece – promise!”

“That’s not what-“

“Chiân,” said Han from a far wall. “Are you doing that _without a wand?”_

Chiân laughed at this and pulled her wand out of her hair, showing it to him from across the room. “No, it’s just here – see?”

And she stepped through the portrait hole. Ignoring the fat lady’s alarmed cries at her quarry, she happily went on her way. She was greatly looking forward to the Slytherin’s reactions. With careful and consistent focus she could spin the bust about a metre in front of her. She already felt very at home in this strange, behemoth of a fortress. She went on her way, nipping through the corridors, occasionally asking paintings for directions, and hiding in strategic nooks from patrolling teachers, before arriving triumphantly back in Slytherin common room with a dramatic flourish, presenting her prize and accepting their wild applause.

Chiân was getting on well with her fellow first years, as well as most of the second and thirds years. The older students hadn’t seemed as interested in daring the first years to commit mild infractions. However, when Chiân arrived in the common room with a large marble bust of Harry Potter, even the NEWT level students came crowding around to look, laughing.

“But how did you get it back down here?” asked a sixth year called Demi, astonished.

“Um, levitated it,” said Chiân modestly, feeling pleased at the impressed looks they all gave her.

“Fucking hell, you can already do Wingardium Leviosa?” said someone else.

“And bloody effectively, too.”

“She’s been here like three days.”

“Nobody’s ever actually successfully completed this challenge before, you know,” said Samantha, scratching her ear absently.

“That’s not true.” One of the sixth years was laughing. It was the girl with the shaved head, Pretoria Clarke. “Paul did in his first year-“ she was nodding to a thin, paisley guy with dark hair and bad posture.

“What did he bring back?”

“Nothing,” said Paul curtly.

“Also untrue – you managed to get a leg-locker curse, if I remember correctly,” said one of his friends, to general laughter.

Some seventh years used their wands to shift the glistening black grand piano which had its own raised area of marble flooring at one end of the chamber. They gave Harry Potter pride of place there, overlooking the common room. Someone gave him a Slytherin scarf, draping it around him affectionately.

Amidst laughter and admiration, the older students decided that Chiân’s reward would be to accompany some of them on their next kitchen raid, probably that weekend.

The other first years were awed and jealous of her, and asked her excited questions about her excursion into enemy territory all the next day at breakfast.

Chiân tried to move the conversation away from herself a little – not out of modesty, of which she was lacking, but of disinterest. She was aided by the arrival of the owl post, which still made most of the first years shriek.

If only Chiân’s lessons had been going as well as her social escapades. Though she was enjoying them and going to bed each night with her head crammed full of miraculous creatures and strange-sounding plant names, she was increasingly nervous about wand work.

In their first charms class with Professor Wexel Chiân hadn’t even brought her wand. Their morning had consisted of Care of Magical Creatures and Potions, neither of which had required it. They weren’t even doing real spells yet, but after instructing them all to practice some basic wand gestures in the air, Professor Wexel spotted that she did not have her wand.

He made a noise of mild bemusement when she told him she’d left in her dormitory that morning.

“Miss Maeroris, you should learn now that it is deeply unwise to go anywhere in the magical world without your wand. I will let you off this time, but please do not leave it behind again. It is unlikely that there will be many classes in which it is not a fundamental part of your instruction.”

Chiân had tried to protest that she didn’t need her wand, but Professor Wexel seemed to think she simply meant she didn’t need it to practice hand motions.

Feeling tense, Chiân had hurried down from the charms corridor, threading through many staircases and corridors almost without having to think about the direction she was taking. She had a pretty good head for directions.

Some of the Slytherins had transfigured their shoes to pop out little wheels when they clicked their heels or said certain word, and liked to roller-skate down the longer corridors to save time. But also because it was fun. The previous evening Vessy had tried to do the same to her shoes, sitting on their dormitory floor. She had impatiently prodded the soles of her shoes with her wand until she managed to melt them to her feet and had to get carried up to the hospital wing by an exasperated fifth year called Will.

Chiân took off her docs when she got to the longest, gently sloping corridor. Checking for the Bruchs, who were very good at turning up just as you were about to do something stupid, she took a run up and executed a spectacular sock-slide two thirds of the way down the corridor.

By the time she got back to the charms classroom there were only fifteen minutes left of class and none of them required her to use her wand.

Somehow it wasn’t until Transfiguration with Professor Galbraith that Thursday afternoon that Chiân really came face to face with the issue.

Professor Galbraith, head of Ravenclaw house, was tall, bony, and hawk-like. She reminded Chiân quite a lot of Maleficent, from the old Disney movie. She was strict and formal, very beautiful, and very efficient.

Chiân had been fascinatedly listening to her grand introduction to Transfiguration while Lydia picked her fingernails with a clean quill-tip. Chiân couldn’t understand how anyone didn’t think this the most interesting thing in the world. But then they reached the practical part of the lesson, and her heart sank.

Most of the other students were excited to collect their matchsticks from the front desk and get on with tapping their wands against them, drawing into focus the ‘desired trajectory of substance’, or whatever phrase it was that Professor Galbraith had used. Inversely Chiân’s excitement had evaporated, and she hung back in trepidation.

“You alright?” asked Vessy, noticing her reticence as she passed her.

Chiân shrugged the question off and returned to her seat with a matchstick. She sat with it for a bit just holding it, her wand on the desk in front of her. Around her enthusiastic first years from both Ravenclaw and Slytherin were gesticulating and shouting at their matchsticks, waving their wands about and effecting very little save the occasional spark.

She didn’t understand why this was so hard – why it frightened her so much. Well, she did, actually – the memory – a hand, outstretched, a scream, the rubble, the dust, the ambulance ride – but she was perfectly happy attempting magic without a wand in her hand. She didn’t understand why a simple stick of wood made such a difference.

Staring glumly at the desk, Chiân didn’t noticed Professor Galbraith approaching her until Vessy kicked her hard under the table.

She straightened up and grabbed her wand, trying to look busy.

“Maeroris,” said Galbraith. “What seems to be the problem?” He tone was officious but not unkind.

Chiân looked up at her, feeling uncomfortable. “Um, nothing, Professor.”

A single, defined black brow raised itself on the teacher’s face. “Then kindly attend to the task at hand, please.”

Chiân gripped her wand and took a deep breath. She was staring at the matchstick but could see Vessy and Lydia in her peripheral vision, watching her.

She liked her wand. It was a friendly presence in her hand, and it made sense to her as part of her environment. But the movement she could find when she went into the deep places in her head, the power she could feel and with great concentration and very careful attention, control, she couldn’t make go into the wand.

Chiân could almost feel the wand waiting patiently in her hand, which was clenching harder and harder around it. Her knuckles were turning white and brittle. Chiân felt like she was going to tear herself in half. _Monster_ , screamed her mother, and Chiân’s vision started to judder violently. Determined, panic rising, she pushed the power towards the wand, and something enormous and primal within her pushed it back.

The feeling of forcing two enormous opposing magnets towards each other was deafening in her ears, and before she knew what was happening her hand had let go of the wand, rigid and clawing, and something gave way.

White hot panic exploded from somewhere beneath her ribcage and came out as an inhuman, powerful sonic boom.

Chiân barely caught the screams of her classmates as they ducked for cover. She was gasping for air, hunched over her desk in the wake of whatever monumental thing had just erupted from her. She blinked a few times amidst the noise, trying to claw back into her senses, trying to calm herself.

The first thing she could focus on was the tall figure in front of her, arms raised so that her ornately patterned purple and silver robes billowed out behind her. Professor Galbraith had her wand raised towards the windows all along the classroom.

Chiân and the rest of the class were raising their heads to stare around at the windows. Every pane of glass had shattered, but not a single tiny shard had hit the floor. Each one was floating in the air, suspended by Professor Galbraith, who murmured something. In the next moment she worked her wand to direct the fragments back into their frames, melding them together once more.

There was a hush as the windows reformed, and then every head turned towards Chiân. She was shaking uncontrollably, not sure if she could really move yet, somehow sure that her mother was pausing between screams and would burst into the room at any moment, somehow certain that her father was crying.

Professor Galbraith, expression unreadable, swept to her desk. She flicked her wand at some parchment and a quill, which scribbled furiously for a moment. Then two sheets rose up and folded themselves into paper birds. They shook themselves a little and took off through one of the open – and miraculously whole – windows.

She addressed the class after a moment. “Magic can be… volatile. You are young and untrained, and I’m sure that many of you have moments in your past where some magic has come forth unbidden from you – moments of great fear, or anger perhaps. I would ask you to consider those moments when you think of your classmate here, and to continue to respect her.”

If Chiân had been able to feel anything in that moment she might have been embarrassed, but Chiân had never been very good at embarrassment. She was still ringing internally with the aftershock of whatever had just happened. Galbraith was saying something else to the class about homework and trusting that they would behave themselves until the bell rang, and then she was once more standing over Chiân’s desk.

“Miss Maeroris, please follow me. Don’t worry, you are not in trouble.” She gave a small, brief smile.

Chiân looked dumbly up at her, then shook herself a little, clumsily pushing back her chair and scrabbling for her bag.

“Leave your things. Miss Willoughby, would you please gather Miss Maeroris’s belongings and return them to her dormitory at an appropriate moment? Thank you. Chiân, with me.”

They left the classroom and Chiân’s heartrate began to return to something vaguely normal. They climbed a staircase in silence, a portrait full of ladies in extraordinarily oversized hats watching them curiously as they passed.

Chiân was coming out of her head just enough to realise that she was in new territory when they stopped. Professor Galbraith straightened herself and faced a large, austere statue of a griffin.

“Begonias,” she said primly. Chiân stared at the statue. It gave a single, curt nod of its beak and stepped aside to allow them into the slowly materialising staircase beyond.

They climbed the steps, which were a dark, rich polished wood, and Chiân found her voice again. “Where are we going?”

Professor Galbraith did not answer. They reached the top of the stairs. A wide set of beautifully carved double doors, stained a light bluish-grey, stood before them. Galbraith knocked twice.

Across the doors were intricate, raised wood-scenes. Chiân was staring at them, trying to take in all the figures and trees, the strangely shaped creatures that made up the fresco. All of a sudden one of the dancing wood nymphs turned her head and said in a small, clear voice,

“The Headmaster will see you now.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> An audio recording of this chapter can be found here:
> 
> https://soundcloud.com/kristin-briggs/4-chapter-four-libations-and-limitations-audio-recording/s-REjVNl1q3r9?in=kristin-briggs/sets/firebug-book-i-chian-maeroris-and-the-secret-library-of-fire/s-Ikj2jpymg6t


	5. A Petrarchan Summit

The headmaster’s office was breath-taking. Chiân followed Professor Galbraith into the room and made an involuntary noise of wonder.

The room was spacious and circular and stretched up several storeys to a golden-edged dome of crystalline glass. The sunlight of the afternoon refracted through this window and cast dancing flits of colour across the spines of the many, many books which lined the walls of the office. Artefacts and instruments of strange and mysterious purpose were nestled in amongst books of all shapes and sizes.

Chiân was intrigued to see that the most accessible ring of shelves, on the level of the Headmaster’s desk, appeared to be full of paperback crime novels. Just above this, on perhaps the only clear portion of wall, was a wide arc of portraits, mostly of old men. All of them were asleep.

“Headmaster, this is Chiân Maeroris, a first year Slytherin,” Galbraith was saying. Chiân quickly turned to meet the eye of Professor Petrarch.

He was sat behind a large desk of the same polished wood as the stairs and bookcases, and was shuffling away stacks of parchment. He looked up at them.

“What brings you both here on this lovely Thursday afternoon?” he said genially.

“Miss Maeroris just had something of an outburst in my transfiguration class.”

“Causing trouble already are we?” he said, smiling.

“Not exactly, Headmaster,” said Galbraith, and stepped closer to him. Chiân hovered awkwardly behind her. She wished her school robes had more effective pockets into which she could stuff her hands.

“Guilliame,” she said urgently. “It very much resembled an obscurus. Not as severe, but enough to cause significant sonic and material destruction.” She was speaking low and fast, but not enough that Chiân couldn’t hear every word.

Both adults turned to look at her.

When Chiân was a child her mother had started erupting into such violent hysterics every time she caught sight of Tian, her brother, that Chiân had taken to turning him invisible every time she came up to their bedroom. It had been easier on all of them, in Chiân’s opinion, and Tian hadn’t seemed to mind. She had, only on a very few occasions, succeeded in hiding herself as well, though this took a great deal more effort than concealing her brother. She dearly wished right now that she had put more effort into mastering this invisibility.

“Tell me more,” said Professor Petrarch. His face was serious as he got up from his desk.

“She was showing some resistance to taking up her wand when it came to the practical part of the exercise – transfiguring matchsticks, I’m sure you remember – and I assumed nerves, or perhaps shyness. Upon pressing her I thought it might simply be old-fashioned rebellious childishness, but…” Galbraith glanced at Chiân, who was staring furiously up at the domed ceiling, determined not to blush.

The headmaster walked to a grand fireplace along one wall. He was reaching for a small bowl of what looked like very fine grey sand.

“I have already alerted Dietrich and Mary,” said Professor Galbraith quickly, and he nodded approvingly, lowering his hand.

“Are they on their way?”

“They ought to be, yes.”

It took Chiân a second to realise that they must be using the first names of some of the teachers.

Just then she spotted a faded, rumpled shape on a shelf above the fireplace. It was the Sorting Hat. Chiân remembered its words about Slytherin House.

_“Those who strive in ceaseless toil_

_Towards better selves from troubled soil,_

_In Slytherin may find their home,_

_A place of rest from which to roam.”_

‘Troubled soil’ sounded a bit too much like the ‘very bright but doesn’t listen’ that she used to get on her report cards, Chiân thought. And as for ‘better selves’ –

“Chiân?” She jumped and looked at Professor Petrarch.

“Yes? Uh, sir?”

“Did you bring your wand with you?”

Chiân opened her mouth to say ‘no’ but then Professor Galbraith moved. She pulled Chiân’s wand from her robes and held it out to the headmaster. Chiân gulped, feeling inexplicably uncomfortable as he took it.

He examined it for a moment, even using it to conjure a puff of mist. The mist fell in cool droplets and drifted against Chiân’s face, unexpectedly refreshing.

“Mr Wiseman is a good friend of mine,” he said thoughtfully. “Yes, the wandmaker.” He smiled at her look of surprise. “I do not say this to embarrass you, but he has told me the unusual story of your time in his shop just last week.”

Galbraith was looking at her curiously and she again wished very much to be invisible.

“I… sorry, sir.” Chiân wasn’t apologising for anything in particular. She had just wanted to break the silence.

“Oh, you haven’t done anything wrong, my girl. You know, it’s not wholly uncommon for a wizarding child to perform magic long before they are matched with a wand. Though from what Julius told me you have achieved a remarkable amount of control.”

“Thank you, sir,” Chiân said quietly.

“Tell me,” he said, lowering her wand and looking grave. “Your father is Fergus Maeroris, is he not?”

Startled, Chiân nodded.

“He attended this school, you know.”

“I did know that,” Chiân said, though she didn’t know much more than that.

“He was a Ravenclaw, if I remember correctly,” he said, more to Professor Galbraith than to Chiân. “He married a muggle – that is, a non-magical person, yes?”

Chiân just looked at him. She wasn’t sure what any of this had to do with her ability to break windows. She noticed that Galbraith had an expression of shrewd comprehension on her face.

“Chiân,” he sat back down at his desk, placing her wand in the centre of it. “Tell me how your mother feels about your acceptance into Hogwarts, and your magical abilities on the whole?”

Chiân was just opening her mouth in surprise when the same small voice of the wood nymph interrupted from behind them.

“Professor Dietrich Wexel and Miss Mary Mollis here to see you, Gilly.”

“Good, good, send them in.”

The doors opened and in came Chiân’s head of house, looking alarmed. Behind him was a tiny petite woman wearing an old-fashioned maid’s cap and apron. Her fantastically curly brown hair was making every attempt to escape the confines of the cap. Her face was kind and bright.

“Miss Maeroris, have you met our school nurse, Miss Mary Mollis?”

Chiân grinned in spite of the atmosphere of the room. “I haven’t, but my friend Vesper has.”

“Oh dear me, yes. How are her feet?” said the nurse fondly.

“Fine,” Chiân smiled back at her.

Professor Wexel interrupted, asking to be brought up to speed. Professor Galbraith quickly described the lesson’s events to them.

“But she can’t be an Obscurial – she was registered with the office of Underage Magic, yes? Surely they would have detected an obscurus under the trace charm?” said Professor Wexel.

“That’s hardly the biggest issue, Dietrich,” said Galbraith hotly. “An Obscurus often doesn’t survive the violence of their condition past a very young age-“

“Though there are exceptions to that rule,” said Professor Petrarch firmly, cutting her off.

“Excuse me,” said Chiân. “But what is an obscurus?”

They all looked at her as if they had forgotten she was there. It was Petrarch who answered.

“As you will be aware by now, the magical world takes great pains to keep itself hidden and secret from the rest of the world. Historically, witches and wizards have suffered a great deal of persecution, and so it benefits everybody for us to live beneath the radar, so to speak. The Ministry of Magic keeps careful track of magical families and can detect underage magic of any kind in this country. You can imagine the chaos if magical children with very little control over their abilities were left unsupervised and unaccounted for.”

Chiân noticed that a few of the portraits on the walls were awake now and listening in. Or possibly they had simply stopped pretending to be asleep.

Petrarch continued. “However, despite the best efforts of the Ministry and the wider wizarding community a child may still find themselves growing up in an environment which is… aggressively hostile to their magic.”

He paused. “In short, an obscurus is what happens when a child represses their magical abilities. It is, if you will, the manifest force of all the magic the child has attempted to reject and deny. Magic is a creative force and it cannot be destroyed. If supressed for long enough, it will... take on a form and a will, if you like, of its own, usually to the ultimate demise of the child.”

Chiân stared at him.

“Don’t worry, dear,” chipped in Miss Mary Mollis. “You’re not one of them, I’m sure of that.”

“We all are,” said Petrarch reassuringly, watching Chiân’s face work through her myriad reactions to this information. “There is something called the Decree for the Reasonable Restriction of Underage Sorcery, under which operates the ‘Trace’ charm, as Professor Wexel has mentioned. The Ministry is aware of all instances of underage magic, and if you were an obscurial – a true one – it would have been very plain.”

Chiân cleared her throat, which seemed tight. “What do you mean ‘a true one’?” she whispered. “Am I… do I have-“

A bell sounded, making her jump.

“If I may, headmaster, I should return to my next class,” said Galbraith. He nodded to her. She gave Chiân one last penetrating look and swept out of the office.

“Do you need to return as well, Dietrich?”

“Not at all,” he said. “My seventh years are having a double lesson and are probably perfectly content to continue ignoring the tasks I set them in my absence.”

“Good, because we have a problem to solve.”

Miss Mary Mollis asked if she could examine Chiân, who was led to a chair by Petrarch’s desk. The nurse was gentle and friendly, keeping up a quiet patter of ‘hmm’s and ‘now let’s just look at this…’ type noises as she waved her wand over Chiân’s head, or tapped her temples.

“Sir,” said Chiân suddenly.

“Yes, Chiân?”

“How did you know about my mum?”

Professor Wexel looked between the two of them.

Petrarch smiled sadly. “An educated guess. You need not tell me details, but from what Victoria described – that’s, er, Professor Galbraith to you – you have all the signs which point to some sort of prolongued traumatic stress resulting in, well, by the sounds of it, strong adverse reactions to wandwork. Would that be a fair deduction?”

Chiân nodded miserably while Miss Mary Mollis took her pulse. The memory ricocheted around her head again: a hand outstretched, her mother screaming, the dust falling, her dad weeping in the ambulance.

Wexel was saying something about wands being an unavoidable part of life and that he was worried that this obstacle might prove disastrous for Chiân.

“How like a Charms teacher,” said a sniffy voice from above them. The portraits had got tired of merely listening.

“Don’t be such a flobberworm, Wallace. Every witch or wizard needs a wand,” said another wizard across the office.

The first speaker drew himself up indignantly, glowering at the other portrait, but before they could argue further Petrarch waved them quiet.

“It is short-sighted to centre one’s entire grasp of magic upon a wand. That I grant you. Many magical life forms, and indeed many other members of the magical community get along perfectly well without one-“

“Yes, but not _human_ -“ started one of the portraits. It was a fat old man with an almost circular beard of ginger hair.

Ignoring him, Petrarch ploughed on. “However, I daresay Miss Maeroris will have a difficult time in several of her lessons without one.”

Wexel and several of the portraits were making noises of assent, but Chiân wasn’t listening. A thought had occurred to her.

“Sir?” her voice was drowned out by the old Headmasters and Mistresses.

“-she should have counselling. Send her to Penelope for Merlin’s sake-“

“- best option is just to throw yourself in at the deep end, girly. Square up and face your fears!”

“Mister Petrarch?”

“ – just become a herbologist. Nobody ever did any proper magic in a garden – “

“Now you take that back, Harold, or I’m coming over there-“

“Oh just you _try-“_

“Quiet, please,” Petrarch said loudly, and the room fell silent. “Chiân,” he gestured for her to speak.

“Thanks. Um, this may be a stupid thought but like, isn’t a wand just a bunch of like… magic wood and… and stuff inside it?”

“It’s a little more complicated than that,” said Wexel thickly.

“A little, but fundamentally yes. Continue.”

“Well,” Chiân was regretting speaking up. “I do actually… like my wand. Mr Wiseman made it for me and it helps me focus. But… I don’t need to actually… like, hold it, do I?”

Petrarch looked thoughtful and Wexel deeply dubious. “You know, Miss Maeroris, that’s correct. In fact many a skilled witch or wizard can perform all their customary magic with just as much ease if only their wand is about their person. The waving is, I suppose you could argue, just an extra tool to help refine the action.”

Wexel scoffed. “You and I both know that is not true, Guilliame.”

“I don’t know that I ‘know’ anything of the sort, Dietrich,” said Petrarch mildly, arching his fingertips. “Perhaps we learn things the long way around. After all, one may eventually do away with both words and motion.”

Chiân was not sure what this meant, but it seemed to give Professor Wexel food for thought.

“Professor?” she asked again. “Couldn’t I just… work without my wand?” she felt hopeful. She was still reasonably sure she didn’t actually need it, but being told as much by the headmaster would make her feel a whole lot better.

“I think, for now, Chiân, you should keep your wand on you just as you normally would. If in a lesson you feel up to it, you can practice your spellwork along with the rest of the class. If, however, it overwhelms you in any way, you have my permission to sit out of the activity. And,” he looked pointedly at Professor Wexel here, “if you should feel the inclination to attempt your work without your wand, you have my permission to go ahead, though you should appreciate that the wand renders any magical exploits significantly safer for any innocent bystanders – not to mention you yourself.” He smiled at her.

“Thank you, sir,” said Chiân, feeling humbled.

She also agreed to go see Mrs Pemberton the next evening after her lessons, the school counsellor. With a final farewell to Professor Petrarch, Professor Wexel walked her out of the office. As soon as they reached the doorway Chiân heard the portraits recommence their heated debates.

Professor Wexel did not say much to her as they walked back to the common room. They were both lost in thought, it seemed. Chiân was thinking about wands, and wondering whether she should have mentioned that she had performed a perfectly sturdy levitation charm without either incantation or wand waving only a few nights before. He bid her goodbye at the entrance to the common room, and Chiân entered. She looked thoughtfully across at the face of Harry Potter. Someone had added googley eyes and a woolly hat.

As soon as they saw her Vessy and Lydia came bounding forwards. They were followed quickly by Calix and Egan and the other two Slytherin boys. Chiân had learnt that they were called Kyril and Ben, who preferred ‘Benji’.

“What happened?”

“Are you alright?”

“Did you get into trouble?”

“Can you teach _me_ how to blow up windows?”

Chiân smiled at them, but there was still a ball of tightness in her stomach which made her feel drained.

She answered her friends’ questions as minimally as she could, then broke through to head to the dormitories. She was desperate to be on her own – to sit and think in the quiet.

“Do you want us to come?” called Lydia after her and Chiân shook her head, disappearing down the wide silver steps that led to the dormitory corridor.

Vessy had left Chiân’s school bag on her bed for her. Gratefully she shoved it out of the way before flopping face-down into the pillows.

She lay there in the domed room for a while, turning over to gaze unseeingly up at the ceiling. It was patterned with silver stars and green leaves, connected by a delicate impasto of vines. Running through every dorm on the corridor dividing the male from the female dorms was one long, metres-thick aquarium tank, filled with exotic fish and strange, many-limbed reptiles. It was calmly lit with soft blue light, even at night. It mimicked the much larger, room-length window of the main common room upstairs. The first night here Chiân had assumed that this wall of the common room had been an ordinary window, or an ineffective and very long mirror. She had been stunned to come down in the morning and find that it looked out into the depths of the lake.

One of the hazes for the first years earlier that week had been challenging them to go for a swim in the partitionary aquarium. This had involved going into one of the bathrooms, removing a stone tile from the floor and squeezing into a large pipe which fed down into the tank.

Only Egan had fit, and the Slytherins had all run from room to room laughing and cheering him as he floundered around in the thick algae and water weeds. His hair still looked a little green.

Chiân lay there and watched a blobby sort of creature with petal-like flaps around its face try to catch a water beetle. It pulsated slowly, making very little progress.

Why had she been so scared? She had held a wand fine in Mr Wiseman’s shop. She had even done magic with it.

Yes, she said to herself, except she hadn’t used the wand, had she? It had been merely a stick of wood at that point.

Although she hadn’t known that in the moment. So why had Transfiguration class been so different?

Chiân pulled her wand out of her robes and raised her arm. Alone in the room she pointed the wand straight upwards, trying to muster up the courage to try one of the charms Professor Wexel had been teaching them.

Her hand trembled again and after a moment she dropped her arm. Tears pricked in her eyes. She turned back over and pressed her face into the pillow. Chiân let out a frustrated scream which was muffled by the bedding.

What if she never learnt to be a proper witch? What if she never got over this stupid, terrible, idiotic fear of wands? What if they gave up trying to teach her after only a couple of weeks and she got sent home? What if she turned out to be one of those… obscure things, and it _killed_ her?

For the first time, Chiân panged with loneliness and childlike fear. She wanted her mum – but not the mum who screamed at her and looked warily around with a tense expression every time she walked into a room. She wanted the mum who laughed with her and took her to the movies, who recommended old punk albums to her and made her favourite food on her birthdays.

Tears dribbled out of her eyes, more out of shame than loneliness.

She had just started to reach for her earphones when she remembered that they weren’t going to work in here. It was the final straw, and she burst into tears.

Chiân cried herself into a fully-clothed nap. She awoke late in the afternoon, and emerged bleary-eyed into a half-empty common room.

“Hello,” it was Kyril. He pushed his floppy hair out of his eyes and beckoned her over to the table where he, Egan and Calix were sitting. There were several of these embedded coffee-tables in the Slytherin common room. According to the older students they could flip over to become indoor firepits – but only if you asked nicely.

“What time is it?” she said, sliding into a chair.

“Half eight.”

“You’ve missed dinner,” added Calix, looking at her with interest.

“Ah, fuck’s sake. Why didn’t anyone wake me up?” she said, annoyed.

The boys glanced at each other.

“Because they’re scared of you,” said Calix, smirking a little. Chiân glared at him.

“Are you a metamorphmagus?” asked Egan suddenly, as if he couldn’t hold it any longer.

“A – what?”

“A metamorphmagus,” he repeated. “A magical person who can like, change their appearance and stuff.”

Chiân looked blank. “I don’t know if you noticed, but the only thing I changed was the windows’ appearance.”

Calix and Kyril laughed. Egan looked affronted. More Slytherins were drifting into the common room, clearly coming back from dinner. The long window into the lake was just light enough that the occasional fish could be seen approaching the glass before disappearing back into the inky blue. Two second years approached their circle.

“You talking about metamorphmagi?” asked one.

“Yeah,” said Egan uncertainly.

Kyril rolled his eyes as the girl shoved him into one corner of the chair and squeezed herself on as well. “This is my big sister, Annabeth. Annabeth, this is Calix, Egan, and Chiân.”

They greeted each other. The girl who was not Annabeth introduced herself as Nora.

“There’s a metamorphmagi in this room right now,” said Annabeth imperiously. “Bet you can’t guess who.”

Kyril looked grumpy, and also slightly squashed. “How would I be able to – get _off_ – guess who, when the whole point is that they look different all the time?”

“What exactly is a… one of those?” asked Chiân.

Nora explained. “Some witches and wizards are born being able to like, change their facial features and hair colour and stuff at will. It’s really rare.”

“More than that,” said Annabeth. “They can change their actual _bodies_.”

“Is it her?” asked Calix, who was pointing to the skin-headed girl with a nose ring.

“Nope.” Annabeth was clearly enjoying taunting her brother, but Nora took pity on them.

“It’s this kid called Zerry. They’re over there.” She pointed to the beanbags, which were occupied by a large group of fourth years. The ferns in that corner of the room draped over them like a gazebo, creating a cozy, private corner.

“Is Zerry a boy or a girl?” asked Egan.

“Neither,” shrugged Annabeth. “They’re really chill with being asked about it, if you want to know more.”

“Where does she – uh, it-“

“They, idiot.”

“Where do _they_ sleep?” Kyril sounded bewildered.

Annabeth opened her mouth to give a sassy answer, but then pursed her lips. “That’s a good question, actually.”

Vessy and Lydia returned to the common room with Dreya and Kaitlin and the rest of the third years. They gave Chiân nervous smiles, and Chiân felt her heart clench again. Was she going to be treated like a live landmine now? She didn’t think she had the energy to deal with it at that moment, and was withdrawn and moody for the rest of the evening.

She remained subdued and miserable the next morning, until something unexpected happened at breakfast.

Very hungry from having missed dinner the night before, Chiân was intent upon her toast and did not immediately notice the sleek brown owl which was settling itself just in front of her.

“Ooh, you’ve got a letter,” said Lydia, offering the bird a piece of her hash brown. Lydia and Vessy were both from wizarding families and were both very used to owls. Chiân was still adjusting.

“Do you want me to get it?” Vessy asked her, already undoing the string which held the letter to the owl’s leg. It hooted its thanks for the hash brown and took off again, soaring gracefully through the morning noise.

Chiân watched it go, taking the letter from Vessy.

“How do they know where to go?”

“What do you mean?” said Lydia.

“Well they’re trained, aren’t they,” said Vessy as if this was uninteresting. “Who is your letter from?”

Chiân opened it. “It’s my dad!” She said, heart leaping, cracking into a smile.

She read the letter quickly.

_“Dear Chiâny,_

_I hope your first week at Hogwarts has been wonderful. I loved every minute of my time at the castle and I can’t tell you how pleased I am that you are there now getting to do it all for yourself. What house are you in? Have you met anybody nice? Is professor Meyerbeer still there? I always liked him._

_I know you didn’t leave on the best of terms with mum, and I really hope you’re not feeling guilty about that. We’ve been having some really good chats about it all and she’s calmed down a lot about the idea of you getting a good magical education. Don’t take this the wrong way but I think time away from the situation will probably be good for you both in the long run. She loves you very much, you know._

_You’re the bravest kid I’ve ever met, and I know you’re gonna do great things. If there’s anything we can send you – if you need anything or just want cheering up at any point – let me know. I’ve sent this by normal post to a friend I know who has an owl. If you address your answer to me with c/o Sigmund Prewett then one of the school owls should be able to get it to him and he’ll forward it on to me._

_Love you, miss you a bunch,_

_Dad”_

Chiân’s eyes pricked a little again, but this time with deep affection for her father.

She spent all morning thinking in her head about what she would write back – all the things she wanted to mention, the stories she wanted to tell him, and so many questions for him about his time at Hogwarts. She was so heartened by the letter that when Charms came around she felt relaxed enough to get out her wand and practice the swish and flick motions of the lesson along with everyone else. Professor Wexel had nodded approvingly at her as he patrolled the class.

The grounds were drenched in rich autumnal sunshine and a couple of the Ravenclaw girls had invited her, Lydia, and Vessy to come explore the grounds with them after lessons finished that afternoon. Chiân had to explain that she was supposed to go see the school counsellor, but was pleased that they all seemed genuinely disappointed she wouldn’t be joining them.

After potions, which was all the way back down in the dungeons, Chiân steeled herself and climbed the many flights of stairs back up to the counsellor’s office.

It was somewhere on the fifth floor. Chiân wandered around, peering at her reasonably unhelpful map of the school. She had been going in circles for at least ten minutes when she bumped into some Hufflepuffs and asked them for directions.

By the time she knocked on the door she was fifteen minutes late and a little out of breath. She pressed a quick hand to her chest and felt both wand and letter in her inner pocket. She took a deep breath.

“Come in,” called a woman’s voice.

Chiân entered and was surprised to recognise the woman who had led the first years across the lake. She smiled at Chiân as she entered. The office was simple and uncluttered, her desk adorned only with a moving photograph of two children and a man who must be their father.

“Now,” she said, offering Chiân the seat opposite her. “In your own words, why are you here?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> An audio recording of this chapter can be found here:
> 
> https://soundcloud.com/kristin-briggs/chapter-five-a-petrarchan-summit-audio-recording/s-jnAcF7RzczW?in=kristin-briggs/sets/firebug-book-i-chian-maeroris-and-the-secret-library-of-fire/s-Ikj2jpymg6t


	6. The Midnight Special

Chiân was preoccupied all throughout dinner that evening. Mrs Pemberton had been very good at holding long silences which Chiân did not feel inclined to break. She had been able to see the Quidditch pitch out of her study window, where the Gryffindor team were holding tryouts. Possibly Mrs Pemberton had taken her long distracted bouts of gazing out of the window as signs of a troubled pre-teen mind, because she had arranged for Chiân to come back every other week for the rest of term.

She sat between Egan and Lydia, eating peas three at a time with her spoon, only half-listening to the first years’ plans to check out the Rubeus House and Gardens tomorrow at nine.

The common room was rowdy when they got back – it was the final night of Libation week, after all. Chiân was in too heavy a mood to just shake it off and join in, so she went up to the dorm room and wrote a letter back to her dad. At first she had hesitated to tell him about all the many rule-breaking hijinks of her first week, but ultimately couldn’t resist. Her dad hadn’t mentioned anything about Tian and she decided not to ask. She wondered how he was getting on with just himself and their parents. Probably living at his friends’ houses, she mused.

Making a mental note to find the Owlery tomorrow, she changed into her joggers and favourite hoodie. It was a faded yellow one with pikachu’s face grinning out of the middle. It had been Tian’s when they were younger.

She was just tying up her hair when she caught sight of herself in the mirror on the back of the dorm room door. Writing the letter to her dad had taken a weight off her shoulders that she couldn’t describe. She found that she was smiling.

Without putting her shoes or socks back on she re-joined the chamber below, unbothered that she was the only one currently not in her school robes. Thinking of her brother she found that the commotion from the chamber above her seemed suddenly inviting and fun.

The Slytherins were playing a complicated-looking game called shot roulette. Dreya and her friends Sephie and Jules explained it to Chiân over the noise. The game itself wasn’t hard to follow – two students would sit opposite each other with six shot glasses between them. Four of them held pumpkin juice, one held shower gel, and one straight fire whiskey. The students would take it in turns to drink a shot, working along the row, and then the spectators had to guess which ones had been the shower gel and fire whiskey. If they guessed either soap or whiskey correctly then the pair would split, the loser going down, the unguessed student moving up. If both were correct or neither, the pair would stay where they were and re-match.

The complicated bit was the freewheeling system by which places were held and rankings were achieved. New students were folded into the middle pairs as people moved up and down. People who dropped from the bottom were jeered at playfully as they re-joined the crowd, sometimes running to throw up soapily into a plant pot. It was being loudly marshalled by the sixth and seventh years, who were also busy pouring the shot glasses.

It was extremely fun to watch, because winning meant regularly downing a shot of shower gel without flinching. Some of the older students, who had clearly done this a lot, had the tactic of gasping dramatically after every single shot, including the water ones, making it almost impossible to tell which shots had been the ‘live’ ones. Chiân noticed that Kaitlin, the third year they had met at their first feast, was particularly good at this tactic, and had already worked herself up to the second-highest seat.

Winners from the top could choose to keep playing or give up as champions. The girl with the burn across her face and pink hair was currently facing off with her girlfriend, the stocky girl with a shaved head. They were both grinning as their friends shouted and yelled.

“Pretoria and Sam are gonna be there for hours,” yelled Jules to Chiân, pointing to the couple.

Chiân was amused to see that all of the first years had either already participated or were currently clinging on at the bottom end. She wasn’t surprised to see Lydia was still in the running – she seemed like the kind of eleven year old who could already hold her whiskey – and was equally unsurprised when Vessy ran up to her and proudly announced that she had already thrown up twice.

Though sure that she could hold her own if she wished to, Chiân declined an offer to join in. The game apparently could go on all night, and Chiân was enjoying herself just moving around between groups of students. She joined in the guessing, trying to remember the names of the students she stood with, speculating with them at whether someone’s screwed up face meant they’d just drank soap or very strong, magically enhanced liquor.

Chiân was feeling considerably cheered up as it approached one am and Professor Wexel stuck his face in to send them all to bed. She went up to the dorm with Vessy and Lydia, all laughing about how hard Egan had gagged the first time he had got the soap shot. Sometime after going to sleep, however, Chiân’s contented fall into sleep was abruptly interrupted as the dorm room slammed open.

Several tall figures in black came swooping in and threw robes over her face, yelling something about ‘time for her reward’. Chiân screamed as one of them picked her up and carried her out of the dorm room. She could hear Vessy and Lydia laughing as they went back up the stairs. She was just realising what must be happening when the hood was pulled off her, and she found herself face to face with Pretoria Clarke.

“You wanna come on a kitchen raid or what?” she said, and grinned. Chiân only took a moment to grin back. She threw off the robes and jumped out of the chair they had dumped her in. She was surrounded by older Slytherins in various states of dress. Chiân was still in her pyjama bottoms and Pikachu hoodie but didn’t bother asking if she could go get her shoes.

She glanced at the clock above the piano as they left the common room. It was half three in the morning.

There were six of them including Chiân. They all introduced themselves to her, talking much more loudly than Chiân would have dared as they wandered up the long corridor. Pretoria and her pink-haired girlfriend Sam were sixth years. The other three were seventh years. Tori, who was wearing a night robe of black silk topped with a very fluffy hood. Chiân thought it made her look a little bit like Cruella Deville. She was walking with Christoph, who looked like he thought very little of everyone and everything, and Killi, who was leading the way with her wandtip lit like a torch.

There was a yelp of alarm and then Killi swore loudly.

“Fuck, Davey, you nearly gave me a heart attack.”

Into the light of her wand came two sixth years, Davey and Demi. Demi spotted Chiân with a grin and waved.

“Just been to the Huffleplug,” said Davey, brandishing a crumpled brown paper bag.

“Nice,” said Killi.

“Save some for us,” said Tori, purringly.

Behind her Pretoria snorted.

“We’re going to the kitchens. D’you guys wanna come?”

“Oh, sick,” said Demi. “We should’ve teamed up.”

“Nah, we’ll meet you back in the common room,” said Davey.

“Okay, cool.”

The two of them passed into the almost complete darkness of the corridor. Chiân’s feet were freezing and Pretoria and Sam kept laughing at the way she hopped. They made it up to the antechamber Professor Wexel had stopped them in on their first trip down, and did a sharp turn in on themselves, heading up the middle passage, through a tapestry, then off up another staircase.

“I have no idea where we are,” muttered Chiân to Tori, gazing around her at the shadowy castle as they went.

“This stairwell leads up to the basement. It’s something of a back-way because we need to avoid Peeves,” she said, brushing a spider from the breast of her dressing gown. She had long, polished black fingernails and very straight hair. Chiân thought with only a hint of contempt that she was exactly what Vesper probably wanted to be.

“Have you met Peeves yet?” asked Killi, ushering them to hide behind a suit of armour as a ghost passed the far end of the corridor.

“No, though I’ve seen him from a distance,” said Chiân.

They waited for a minute longer, then Killi waved them forwards.

They came out onto a warmer passage, for which Chiân was grateful. This hallway was lit with dim and cheerful yellow torches. They passed a stack of fat wooden barrels up along one of the walls and Pretoria told her they were now on the kitchen corridor.

“That’s the Hufflepuff common room,” said Sam, nodding at it. Chiân did a double take at the barrels they had just passed.

“Wh- the barrels?”

“No, dipshit, behind them,” said Pretoria, laughing.

“You have to tap one of the barrels with a certain rhythm or something to get in,” said Christoph.

“I’ve never tried,” said Tori airily. “You get drenched in vinegar if you get the wrong barrel.” Christoph smirked at her and Pretoria rolled her eyes.

“But if you tap a certain _other_ barrel then you can occasionally get pre-arranged parcels of our favourite herbs and spices.”

“Ah, the Huffleplug,” said Chiân, and Pretoria winked.

“Here we go,” said Killi, raising her wand. They had come to a stop in front of large, jolly-looking painting of a bowl of fruit. “Sam, if you’d like to do the honours,” she stepped back.

“Watch carefully,” Pretoria said to Chiân. Sam had reached out a finger and was tickling the pear in the fruit bowl, which to Chiân’s amazement began to squirm and giggle before giving a small ‘pop’ and turning into a door handle.

Sam turned it and the painting swung forward, just the way the Gryffindor common room entrance had done.

They climbed through, Pretoria bringing up the rear. Chiân’s mouth fell open and for a moment she thought they had just climbed into the Great Hall. Then she realised they couldn’t have, not least because this hall definitely had a ceiling, high and cavernous, and full of smoke from a back wall of bread ovens.

Working around the hall were hundreds of very short, very strange creatures. They were the size of young children, and all appeared to be wearing tea towels. Their noses were comically long and pointy, and they had large, flappy ears which twitched happily as they bustled around.

“What the fuck…” Chiân said under her breath, eyes wide in awe.

“House elves,” said several voices at the same time. Evidently they were a standard sight in the magical world. Or maybe this particular bunch of students just made this trip regularly.

The house elves spotted them in that moment, and a small gaggle of them came flocking to the students with cries of welcome.

“Hi, Flossy,” called Pretoria to one elf who was positively bouncing with excitement.

Chiân stared. They were the weirdest looking creatures she had ever seen. They looked like they were made out of old beef jerky.

“Good morning, Sir and Misses!”

“Hello, Miss and other Miss, and also Miss, and Sir, and other Miss-“

“Welcome, students! Hello!”

“Hello and good morning!”

It was very much how Chiân imagined puppies would talk if they had voices.

Some of the elves had spotted her and seemed elated at a new face. Laughing at their sheer enthusiasm, Chiân introduced herself.

The other students were wandering out into the kitchen, Pretoria and Sam holding hands and chatting to Flossy like she was an old friend.

Chiân moved into the room. It was shaped exactly like the Great Hall, complete with long wooden tables that were set in the same positions. Up and down these tables house elves were powdered up to their tiny elbows with flour or splattered with dough, kneading it into various breads. The smells were mouth-watering.

“This is so cool,” said Chiân out loud to nobody in particular.

“Thank you, Miss Chiân,” an elf beamed up at her.

“Do you guys work here then?” Chiân asked, assuming they wouldn’t mind the obviousness of the question.

“Oh yes, Miss.”

“We are enjoying it very much, Miss.”

“That’s so cool. Erm, what are your names?” she said, still surrounded by six or seven elves who all answered at once. “Oh, okay, um, one at a time, hang on.” She pointed to an elf.

“My name is Bolly, Miss.” He bowed, tea towel flapping.

“And I am Diffy, Miss,” offered the next. Chiân laughed at his eager expression.

Killi came over to her as the others piped in with their names. Killi had just taken an enormous bite out of a cheese scone and spoke with her mouth very full. “These guys are like, the definition of keen. Anything you want, they’ll get it.”

“Oh yes, Miss and Miss! It is our great pleasure to be feeding you with all delicious things,” warbled an elf near Chiân’s knee.

Killi grinned at Chiân. “If you’ve got any favourite foods they don’t have they can probably make it for you at the drop of a hat.”

Chiân looked hopefully at Bolly and Diffy. “You don’t have any soft-dough pretzels, do you?”

The elves’ eyes widened, looking panicked at the thought that they might not, but then another elf hurried over, wiping its tiny hands on its tea towel. “Excuse me, Miss, excuse me! Did you say ‘pretzels’, Miss?”

“Yeah,”

“Hello Miss, I am Woggy. I am thinking that perhaps Foffy might be able to make for you some pretzels, Miss, I am just going and getting him now, Miss!” The elf said all of this very quickly whilst bowing and had run off again before Chiân could blink.

Killi had sat on an unused stretch of table. “D’you want a scone?” she said to Chiân.

“Uh, sure-“ she’d barely said it when a little basket appeared at her elbow, full of fresh cheese scones. “Oh! Thanks,” she said brightly, taking one. It was still hot.

“You are most welcome, Miss!”

Chiân swung a leg over the bench and sat down. The scone was perfect and made her feel warm and happy.

“Why are they all wearing tea towels?” she asked Killi.

“House elves don’t wear clothes, or something. I think it’s an old tradition. Hey Boggy, or whatever your name was – why don’t you wear proper clothes again?”

Bolly looked suddenly very serious. His eyes were massive and seemed to get even larger. “A house elf is supposed to serve, Miss and Miss. A house elf is not an equal to witches and wizards. We are not wearing proper clothes because we are humble servants, Miss and Miss. We are wearing our tea towels _most_ proudly, Miss and Miss.” He kept bowing.

They were almost sycophantic. If they hadn’t been so small and knobbly Chiân thought it might have been disturbing.

Another elf piped up. “It is not always the case, Miss and Miss. We are… we are being _allowed_ to wear clothes, we are just not wanting to.” This elf’s voice was even squeakier, and Chiân wondered if it might be female. The elf looked relieved to have got through the words.

“Why? Why don’t you want to, I mean?”

“A good house elf is liking work, Miss,” she said earnestly. “To some elves clothes are a sign that they do not _have_ work, Miss.”

The other elves looked frightened at the very thought.

“I mean,” Killi’s mouth was full again and she was looking at her scone in admiration. “You’re clearly great at it. Play to your strengths, I guess.”

The elf beamed so hard she actually rocked a little.

The elf from before – Woggy – was running back, almost bent over with determination. He came to a stop in a deep bow in front of Chiân. “Excuse me, Miss, I is asking Foffy if he is knowing how to make pretzels and he says he will get right to it, Miss! If Miss would be so kind as to wait for twenty minutes, Miss! Thank you!”

Chiân was delighted. Soft pretzels were her favourite food. She had only had them very occasionally as a child, first discovering them on a family holiday to Blackpool Pier when she was eight. Pretzels to her meant adventure and fairground rides.

Pretoria and Sam came to join them at the table, each with an armful of food bundles. Chiân was intrigued by the elves and kept asking questions. They pointed her to a plaque above some of the great stone ovens. Chiân squinted at it. It seemed to say ‘SPEW’.

“Does that say ‘Spew’?” she laughed, assuming she had misread it through the haze.

“It is the Society for the Promotion of Elfish Welfare, Miss,” one of them explained. They told her that it was an important movement that had apparently been started by a Hogwarts student whilst still at school. They had campaigned for the rights of elves to have access to pay, work benefits, and, if they wanted it, clothes.

The elves all talked about these things as if it bewildered them and scared them a little, but seemed to understand that it was, all in all, a good thing.

“And do you?” Chiân asked. “Get paid, I mean?”

The elves shook their heads, wide-eyed, looking alarmed at the very thought. “We are being offered, Miss, but we are not _taking_ the pay.”

“I is!” Called an elf from the nearest table. “I is asking for one whole galleon last month and I is using it to buy better potatoes!” He seemed very pleased about this.

The elves around the students beamed again, nodding to each other as if this was in fact the only sensible use of one’s wages.

“So do you guys make the food, like, appear in the Great Hall when it’s ready?”

Diffy nodded, bowing again.

“The Great Hall is directly above us,” said Sam, pointing.

“Yes, Miss. We are laying it out all nicely for each meal and we are sending it up for eating.”

“How do you do that? By magic, I’m guessing?”

They all clamoured their yesses as Killi said “every race has its own kind of magic, you know.”

“Yeah, house elf magic is weird.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh just stuff like, uh, they can’t disobey orders, and if you call them then they have to appear to you, if you’re their master.”

“Oh yes, Miss. Just ask at any time and we are coming to help!”

“What, anywhere in the castle? Oh, thank you.” The elves had just brought them all a mug of milky cocoa. Chiân took hers gratefully. “So do you guys have like, wands and stuff?”

This caused an uproar of squealing.

“Absolutely not, Miss!”

“Never ever!”

“We are not _wanting_ a wand, we are not _having_ a wand-“

“House elves is not having wands, Miss!”

“-not _needing_ a wand-“

Killi and Pretoria were laughing. Chiân looked at them, bewildered by what she’d unleashed.

Sam explained, “they don’t need wands. It’s a totally different type of magic.”

Chiân thought about this. “Does that mean that human magic is a specific magic too?”

“You know, I’d never thought of it like that,” said Sam, giving Chiân a look of real interest. “I suppose so. I mean, when you look at it that way I guess a wand is just a way humans channel their magic. Some non-humans want wands, like goblins, but as far as I know it’s only humans who can legally carry one. Hmm. I wonder if their magic would be different if they had wands.” She looked at her girlfriend.

Pretoria shrugged. “You’re the one doing the History NEWT.”

Chiân had been going to ask what a ‘NEWT’ was, but Killi interrupted. “Where have Tori and Christoph got to?”

“They is going down to the wine cellars, Miss!”

“Ah,” said Pretoria, rolling her eyes. Killi groaned.

“We should wait for them,” said Sam.

“They’re gonna be _ages.”_

“I’m not going anywhere,” said Chiân. “I haven’t got my pretzel yet.”

At that precise moment two elves arrived with a little cloth-wrapped bundle. On top of it was a golden-brown soft pretzel.

The elves told her that the bundle contained five more pretzels, for ‘snacking’ purposes. Chiân was so excited that the others laughed.

About twenty minutes later Tori finally appeared through the haze. She was talking earnestly to Christoph. They were both carrying several very old bottles.

“Right, everyone got everything they want?” Killi was standing up. They all made assenting noises, draining their cocoa and handing the mugs back to elves. “Let’s go, crew. Elves of the kitchen realm, you have our thanks,” she gave a flourishing bow and they bowed joyously back to her.

Chiân was clutching her pretzels to her chest, waving goodbye to the house elves, who called for her to come back soon.

They came very close to getting caught on the way back to the common room. Mrs Bruch was patrolling the corridors, walking along swiftly as if she had somewhere to be. She was carrying a large wood axe, which Chiân assumed was for something other than out-of-bed students. The closest call had been Sam tiptoeing straight into a ghost and letting out a shriek at the sudden icy cold. They’d had to break into a run at that point, scattering down adjacent hallways to get away from the ghost who was yelling after them about curfew.

Still laughing with exhilaration Chiân reached the entrance to the Slytherin common room just behind Killi and Tori. Tori had not found it funny at all and gave a disgruntled hair toss as she delivered the password. The others were already inside, along with several other older students and a distinct smell of weed.

The balls of Chiân’s feet were aching from running barefoot on the cold flagstone floor, but it was an ache of realness and content. She declined to stay up any longer and smoke with them, instead thanking them for the adventure and happily carrying her parcel of fresh pretzels back up to the dorm room. The room was dark except for a slight glow from the aquarium wall which reflected across the luminescent stars on the ceiling.

Chiân could hear Lydia snoring softly in the darkness, and Vessy’s occasional turns in her bed. She lay and looked up at the stars, warm pretzels safely wrapped up in the draw beneath her. She fell asleep thinking about house elves, about food that felt like home, and about a particular kind of human magic.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> An audio recording of this chapter can be found here:
> 
> https://soundcloud.com/kristin-briggs/chapter-six-the-midnight-special-audio-recording/s-E2xCXzkbAyU?in=kristin-briggs/sets/firebug-book-i-chian-maeroris-and-the-secret-library-of-fire/s-Ikj2jpymg6t


	7. Rubeus House and Gardens

All three girls woke up later than they had planned to the next morning. They got dressed and went up to the Great Hall together, swapping stories about the previous night’s adventures over a late breakfast. They wandered out into the grounds as the bells chimed eleven.

They’d missed meeting the other first years for their first visit to Rubeus House and Gardens, but they figured they’d be able to find them inside. None of them had quite anticipated how big the sanctuary was. Even just the area the students were allowed to wander through was enough to take many hours. There were hot greenhouses full of deeply weird plants which insulted you as you passed, or jumped if you coughed suddenly. A tall, wiggly kind of sapling kept trying to pickpocket students as they walked beneath it.

Among the plants were insects and small creatures Chiân had no name for. She was finding everything much more fascinating than Vessy and Lydia seemed to. Chiân lost them twice as she chatted to the staff workers about kinds of butterfly that could change the patterns on their wings, or slugs the size of Chihuahuas that grumbled audibly as they mooched across the earth. Vessy and Lydia were impatient to get to the animal houses, which annoyed Chiân at first. They finally came and bodily dragged her out from a hothouse containing huge cacti with glowing flowers larger than her head. Chiân’s irritation faded almost immediately though.

If the gardens had been dessert of her first week at Hogwarts, then the Rubeus animal sanctuary was the icing on the cake.

Chiân had never been to a zoo, but she imagined it must pale in comparison to this. Every few feet there seemed to be a whole different terrain. Whole rooms of arid desert led into to luscious green corners of tropical jungle. In each alcove was some kind of hutch or nest, or one time even a large velvet pouffe nestled in the bough of a tree. On it were two – well, they looked like very elderly Wombles, right down to the eclectic outfits and pince-nez glasses – playing chess. One of them tipped its hat to her as she passed.

Here and there the staff were tending to the creatures, feeding them, playing with them, and showing them to interested students. Chiân lost sight of the girls again – they were trying to find the unicorn paddock – and was wandering through a long room full of bathing stations and well-spaced pine trees.

“Well, well, well, look who it is,” said a voice. “Thestral girl.” Chiân peered around a tree trunk and saw the Ravenclaw from the carriages, Shanti. She was dressed in a polo shirt and shorts and wearing thick elbow-length gloves. She smiled at Chiân, who was staring at the creature on her arm. “Come say hi,” she said.

It was like a monkey, but with a very different kind of face. It had large, intelligent eyes and silvery blue hair which looked whispy and impossibly soft. It was clinging to Shanti like an oversized baby and nervously eyeing Chiân as she approached.

“Hey there, little guy,” she murmured softly. Then, still staring at the creature, asked “what is he?”

“He’s a demiguise – ooh, don’t worry, they do that. In fact they only really show themselves around people they know and trust.”

Chiân had reached out a hand to touch it but, with a slight shimmer, it had cringed away and then completely disappeared.

Chiân recovered her surprise quickly. “Me too, bud,” she said to the empty air where the creature was sat, now thoroughly invisible.

Shanti was looking at her curiously. “What was your name again?”

“Chiân.”

“Nice to meet you again, Chiân. You like animals, then?”

Chiân shrugged. “Haven’t really thought about it before. All these though,” she gestured vaguely around her, “they’re incredible.”

Shanti agreed and the demiguise rippled back into visibility in her arms, still eyeing Chiân suspiciously. Shanti stroked him gently, making soothing noises.

“Do you work here? I thought you were a student?” Chiân asked.

She chuckled. “I am, but sometimes older students can work here on Saturdays and get training, earn a bit of Hogsmeade money, y’know. They only take sixth and seventh years, I’m afriad” she said, chuckling at Chiân’s excited look. “I did their summer programme after my OWLs and they sometimes take younger students on that. I’m about to give this one a bath, if you want to stay and watch. His name’s Boba. He’s got para-tics, poor guy.”

Chiân watched in admiration as she carried the demiguise to a bathing table. Boba stepped gracefully out of her arms and waited as Shanti pulled on an apron. He was holding his hands together like a little old man and it made Chiân laugh. Boba looked up at her with big, gorgeous eyes, then looked away quickly, clearly shy.

“So, how’s your first week at Hogwarts been?” asked Shanti as she turned on the shower-head. She started carefully soaping Boba’s back and he sighed contentedly, eyes half-lidded.

Chiân chatted with her for a bit about lessons, teachers, and getting lost in the castle. Boba looked a lot smaller with all his fine hair wetted, and he occasionally lifted his sodden arms to purposefully direct Shanti’s soapy gloves to particular spot for scratching. Chiân thought she’d never seen anything so lovely in her whole life.

“Have you had Professor Chancery yet? Her lessons are spectacular.”

“Um, I don’t think so – what does she teach?”

“Divination – oh wait, yeah, they don’t do that in first year, do they? Oh well, look forward to that when you get there.”

Chiân watched her for a few minutes as she scrubbed Boba gently.

“Um, can I ask you a question?” she said at last. Shanti was carefully searching Boba’s body for tics, which he was not enjoying so much.

“Sure – oops, sorry Boba,” she had clearly caught something and he had slapped at her arm with an incredibly quick jerk. “Sorry, darling. There we are, okay, got it. There’s a good boy. Sorry, Chiân, go on.”

Chiân was quiet for a few more seconds, wondering how to phrase it. “On that first day, by the carriages…”

“Yeah,”

“You said something about the, um, the thestral creatures. You said that not everyone can see them. Why is that?”

Shanti continued to search Boba’s hair for a minute longer. Chiân felt strangely like she was being assessed, as if Shanti was trying to work out how much to say. At last she sighed, and straightened up from the demiguise.

“Thestrals are… well, they’re a kind of an omen. They’re pretty rare, even though we have loads at Hogwarts. Most witches and wizards will go a whole lifetime without ever seeing what they actually look like. I’ve only seen pictures.” She paused. “You can only see a thestral if you’ve witnessed someone’s death.”

Chiân stared at her. This was a lot to take in, but Chiân’s brain got stuck at the first hurdle. “But I haven’t. Seen anyone die, I mean.”

Shanti looked at her, an eyebrow raised. “Well, clearly you have.” Boba was also looking at her, though he may have been wondering why Shanti’s attention was no longer on giving him back scratches.

Chiân was shaking her head. “Are you sure? Like, there might be another-“

“No, it’s definitely death I’m afraid. They’re infamous for it. That’s why they’re an omen. They become a whole lot more present in the wizarding world if there’s been a war or something.”

Chiân had no idea what to think. She was looking around at the handful of other workers and creatures in the bathing room. A little way down three staff members were washing down a large, majestic creature with the head of an eagle but a body like a horse, or a lion maybe. A frantic feeling of bile and confusion was rising in Chiân’s throat.

“I think we may have a thestral in at the moment, actually,” said Shanti thoughtfully. “I can’t see them, but I think I remember Rosemary saying something about a thestral calf with a broken leg.”

“Do you think I could go ask it?” said Chiân, then realised how odd that sounded. “Like, who I saw die, I mean.”

Shanti shook her head, smiling a little. “For one thing they can’t speak, but also I don’t think it works like that. They’re just creatures at the end of the day.”

“But creatures with a specific magic,” pressed Chiân, thinking of the house elves.

“Yes, I suppose so. But it’s more about what you can perceive and less about anything they are doing.”

“Oh.” Chiân was lost in thought for a moment, wondering at how a person must change according to the things they witness. “Maybe I saw someone get hit by a car or something when I was a baby.”

“Maybe,” said Shanti.

There was a shout and abruptly Boba vanished. Shanti sighed. “Boba, if you freak out at every loud noise this is going to take all day.”

“Oh shit, those are my friends, sorry-“ Chiân had spotted Lydia and Vessy at the far end of the hall, calling for her. They were now being berated by a sanctuary worker for making a racket and alarming the large bird-headed creature. “Hey, thanks so much for letting me, uh,” she waved vaguely at the invisible demiguise and the bathing station.

“No problem. Come by next week if you like.”

“Sure! Bye, Boba,” she waved in his direction and hurried towards her friends.

“Where have you been?” cried Vessy theatrically. They were with Egen and Benji, and two Ravenclaws called May Torriben and Zachary Fife.

“God, you’ve _got_ to come see the unicorns. They’ve got a mother who just gave birth and her foal is just-“

“- shines _so_ brightly, just amazing-“

Chiân followed them through the Rubeus houses, listening to their excitement and exclamations. They were completely ignoring the many other fantastic creatures and leading her straight through the houses to the paddocks out back.

Chiân tried to put the thestrals out of her mind as they went, but Shanti had been right. In the adjacent paddock to the unicorns was a student worker kneeling in a large, almost empty pen. He was feeding a small, dark, skeletal creature who looked thoroughly fed up. It was lying on the ground in an awkward, gangly kind of way, and didn’t bother to raise its head to take the scraps of meat from his hand.

Forgetting her classmates Chiân watched. The guy could clearly see the creature. He was distracting it with food so that he could bind its front leg to a splint. It wasn’t working very well and every time he pulled the bandage tight the thestral’s spindly, bat-like wings would raise in protest. After just a moment the guy seemed to feel Chiân’s gaze and looked up. She recognised him as one of the Gryffindor seventh years.

He smiled sheepishly and opened his mouth as if to joke about sitting in an empty pen making crooning noises into thin air. Then he caught the expression on her face.

Chiân met his eyes and they shared a very long, searching look. The thestral foal took advantage of his distraction to pull off the bandage with startlingly knife-like teeth. He swore and turned his attention back to the creature, berating it fondly.

There was a giggle in her ear. It was May, the Ravenclaw girl.

“What is he doing?”

Zachary and Egan looked around and snickered as well. “Is he trying to bandage up a fly?”

Vessy grabbed Chiân’s hands and tugged at her. “Chiân, come _on._ The worker said we could help feed them in a minute.”

Reluctantly Chiân tore her eyes away from the Gryffindor and his reptilian, pale-eyed charge. It was clear that none of the others could see the thestral. She tried very hard not to glance backwards as she joined the first years at the ropes of the unicorn paddock.

Chiân did not sleep well that night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> An audio recording of this chapter can be found here:
> 
> https://soundcloud.com/kristin-briggs/chapter-seven-rubeus-house-and-gardens-audio-recording/s-0FS9orm09Nd


	8. Bed talks and Broomsticks

First term was going by very quickly. Chiân was enjoying all of her lessons except Charms and Transfiguration, where she did everything she could to avoid having to use her wand. Her favourite classes were Potions and Care of Magical Creatures, where she excelled.

Ezra Schnittke was the Potions master, and had taken a liking to Chiân. Some of the other teachers got frustrated with the sheer barrage of questions she asked, but Schnittke would frequently come chat with Chiân and her table once he’d set the class to work. They had Potions with the Gryffindors, and Chiân shared a table with Egan, Calix and a Gryffindor kid called Asher, whom Calix had befriended early on. Lydia and Vesper were on the table next to them with two Gryffindor girls called Belinda Wells and Dority Fry. Dory and Bell often joined the Slytherin girls on their adventures around Rubeus House and Gardens, now a staple of their Saturdays.

They never managed to spend as long as Chiân wished in the animal sanctuary, as their homework load often required several hours in the library even if they worked every evening.

Chiân didn’t mind too much, though, as the library was an equally fascinating place. Enormous, mysterious, and semi-lit at every hour of day, the first years found themselves getting very familiar with the broad, smooth wooden tables of the study areas. Chiân was itching to go on a real wander past the rope barriers which cordoned off the many darkened offshoots into the restricted parts of the library.

She and her friends would speculate dreamily about what might be down the long dark passages. Asher kept insisting on a Gryffindor legend about a whole chamber full of different kinds of magical fire. Egan was full of stories about books which taught you how to murder people and could kill you if you read them wrong. Lydia wanted Chiân to use her camaraderie with Professor Schnittke to get a signed note for the restricted section, but every time they tried to come up with a question which might lead to him recommending a book obscure enough he would either point them towards the answer in their copies of _One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi_ , or lend Chiân a book of his own to read.

Chiân’s counselling was also enjoyable, though she wasn’t sure she was using the sessions how she was supposed to. Mrs Pemberton had mentioned something called ‘occlument intransigence’ in their second meeting together, which had led to a long and fascinating conversation about the magical practices of Occlumency and Legilimency. They weren’t doing much talking about Chiân and her issue with wands, but she was learning a whole bunch about navigating the mind and the complex, delicate kinds of magic one could perform there.

Mrs Pemberton had told her about a branch of magic called ‘Psychomancy’. She had even demonstrated to Chiân that not only was it possible for a witch or wizard to extract specific memories from their head, but that they could be stored, examined, and even altered, though this was illegal when done without permission. The silvery strand of almost liquid-looking thought which Pemberton had pulled from her mind had stuck in Chiân’s thoughts for a long time, though she had declined to show Chiân how to do this when she had asked.

Chiân had not forgotten about the thestrals – in fact it was difficult to forget about them when they kept appearing in her dreams. The Gryffindor seventh year, who was called Gale, had let her come over and pet the injured thestral foal the next time he saw her at the sanctuary. He was friends with Han from the train and she’d impressed her fellow Slytherins when the two of them had waved to her in the stands at the first Quidditch match.

“How do you know literally _everybody?”_ said Lydia, looking over at the older Gryffindors as they had taken their seats.

Chiân had shrugged as if it was nothing, but felt a secret pride at her friends in high places.

The first match had been between Slytherin and Hufflepuff. Pretoria and Sam were both on the Slytherin team, along with Kaitlin, several fourth years, and two others Chiân didn’t know. Kaitlin and Alec had excitedly explained the rules of Quidditch to her the previous evening, but it wasn’t until the teams had taken to the air that she finally understood what all the fuss was about.

She remembered the guys on the train saying that the Slytherin team were terrible. At first she didn’t see what they had meant. Pretoria was team captain and, despite being built like the wooden Griffin outside the Headmaster’s office, made flying on a broomstick look as easy and effortless as a swim in the lake. But then the second match came around. This time it was Gryffindor against Ravenclaw, and the difference was astounding.

The speed of play seemed almost ten times that of the first match, despite there being a lot more whistle blowing from Mr Togue, the referee, for fouls. It was also the first time Chiân had really seen house rivalry in full swing. Ozzy was a Chaser on the Gryffindor team. Only two minutes into the game he suffered an almighty smack to the face with a bludger at point blank range. The stands had erupted with roaring indignation. Students were jumping up and down and screaming, including Chiân who was horrified by the amount of blood streaming out of his nose. It had not been a foul though, and a few minutes later in furious retaliation another Gryffindor chaser had deliberately flown straight into the beater, nearly unseating her completely.

The Gryffindor seeker was a fifth year called Mia Patterson, whom Chiân had met during her foray into the Gryffindor common room. Even Chiân could tell that she was an outstanding flyer. She had circled the pitch sitting side-saddle on her broom for the first few minutes of play, and when the snitch was spotted had executed a spectacular chase through the other players, flipping around her broom and pulling off right-angle turns just when she seemed like she was going to collide with someone.

She had caught the snitch after about fifteen minutes, though it felt like the match had gone on forever, and had swung one-handed from her broom to jump down into her team-mates' arms in victory.

All the first years were incredibly keen to get started on their own flying practice, which was scheduled on Tuesday afternoon, three weeks into term. It seemed like the whole year had signed up as they made their way out to the pitch after lessons.

There had been varying degrees of success across the year. Chiân had found that the school broom Mr Togue had placed by her obeyed her command to jump into her hand the first time she commanded it. She felt less smug when it came time to mount the brooms, however. She was suffering a distinct internal conflict of interests. Many first years were not successful in getting off the ground for a few weeks, though Calix and Asher were both zooming around several metres up by the end of the first lesson. Chiân was annoyed with herself, but no matter how she tried she didn’t seem to be able to convince her legs that it was a good idea to leave the ground.

The first time she did successfully fly she was so surprised that she immediately fell off the back of the broom. Vessy had giggled so hard at her that Chiân was strongly tempted to try to turn her into a frog. But then, only minutes later, Vessy did the same thing and Mr Togue had had to chase after her broomstick, which was happily speeding off the pitch.

The sunset was happening earlier and earlier each night as October rolled around, until their dinnertimes were lit by the burning colour of each sunset through the bewitched ceiling of the Great Hall. The dungeons low down in the belly of the school were getting colder and colder. The Slytherins had taken to lighting the firepits in the common room every evening. They warmed the room nicely with their pale, smokeless blue flames.

The first years were all looking forward to the Halloween feast they had heard so much about, marvelling at the decorations which were going up around the Castle. Chiân had almost been able to ignore her wand issues, though Professor Wexel was nagging her more and more frequently to pick up her wand and attempt the charms he taught in their lessons. He resented her flat-out refusal and Chiân was sure that it was only Petrarch’s kind words of permission back in his office which kept Wexel from giving her detention.

The night before Halloween, however, Chiân had another incident.

It was during a flying session that Tuesday. Attendance had dropped off a little as term went on. Either the novelty had worn off, as it had for Vessy and Egan for instance, or the sheer amount of homework and reading to be done was keeping first years tucked away in the library instead of out on the pitch.

There were about twelve of them today. Chiân was enjoying a game of catch with Kyril and Asher, Zachary Fife from Ravenclaw, and a girl named Tiff who Chiân liked a lot. Mr Togue was busy berating a Hufflepuff boy for hitting his friend in the eye with the ball, and while his back was turned they took their game higher and higher. Asher lobbed the ball far above Chiân’s head and she leant into her broom, soaring up to get it, then turning to pelt it at Kyril.

They were so high up now that the stands were beginning to shrink. Tiff raced past Chiân to catch another of Asher’s overhands before Zach could. Chiân turned to watch, then froze.

Movement out across the forest had caught her eye. It wasn’t unusual to see birds of all shapes and sizes flying in and out of the Forbidden Forest, but these were much larger than any birds. As they cleared the trees Chiân found herself unable all of a sudden to move. They were unmistakeably thestrals.

She hovered on her broom, muscles tensed and rigid. There were two of them, and they soared around each other gracefully, almost playful. She wasn’t frightened exactly, but ever since Shanti had told her why she could see them the question had been making her increasingly sleepless. Unbidden, the memory flashed into her head: a hand outstretched, the dust and rubble, a scream, her mother’s scream, the wand in her hands, her dad, crying.

Chiân began to shake. The thestrals had sunk back into the forest but she still couldn’t move. A hand outstretched, the wand, an explosion, her mother screaming, the dust falling like smoke.

Blood was thundering through her ears and she felt the broom beneath her shaking violently.

Powerless – or maybe too powerful – Chiân realised what was going to happen a split second before it did. The panic and terror she had felt in the transfiguration classroom had returned. It roared upwards like a tidal wave within her and broke free from her chest.

The broom she was gripping shattered.

She heard screaming, ripped away by the deafening wind. She was falling, stunned and breathless, falling over and over and over, falling out of the sky.

Shapes, people on broomsticks, screaming people spinning over and over in her fading vision, getting larger, trying to catch her before she hit the ground. They weren’t going to make it. Chiân didn’t have enough breath in her lungs to scream, but the sky was doing it for her. She didn’t know which was going to kill her first – the Quidditch pitch rising up to meet her or the suffocation of spinning over and over and over as she plummeted out of the sky.

Chiân had just a second to wonder if she really was slowing down or just imagining it, when her vision dissolved completely and she passed out, cold.

-

Chiân was both extremely groggy and very hungry when she awoke. For a disorientating minute she thought she was back at home in her and her brother’s room – it certainly wasn’t her dormitory in the Slytherin chambers.

She turned her head, staring around, and realised it must be the hospital wing. The room was long and full of mostly empty beds. Sunlight was coming through the tall windows in pale yellow beams. The only other person in there was a kid several beds down, who was snoring.

Somebody had changed Chiân into a plain pair of unfamiliar night clothes, but she spotted her favourite Pikachu hoodie and jeans folded neatly on the bedside table. Chiân struggled out of the sheets and stood up. She swayed dizzily and flopped down again, head spinning with hunger. It took her a few minutes to change into her own clothes, having to mostly do it whilst sat down, but by the time she was done she felt able to stand. She got to her feet, paused, weighing the dizziness, then took an unsteady step towards the door.

“Excuse me, just where do you think you’re going?”

Chiân stared around at the empty room, then spotted a portrait of a plump older lady on the wall opposite. She was frowning at her.

“Hi, er, what time is it?”

“It is half past seven in the morning,” she said pompously. “I shall go inform Miss Mary Mollis that you have woken up. Please stay in bed.”

Chiân opened her mouth to answer but the witch had already bustled out of frame.

Disgruntled, Chiân lay back on the bed, staring up at the ceiling.

Miss Mary Mollis came out of an adjacent office a moment later, beaming at her.

“Hello dear, how are you feeling?”

“Fine.” The nurse was checking her forehead and pupils. “Hungry,” Chiân added truthfully.

“Well, let’s see if you can’t go down to breakfast in a bit,” she said brightly, and flicked her wand over Chiân’s head, taking some kind of reading.

“Did I pass out yesterday? On the pitch?”

Miss Mary Mollis leant back. “I’m afraid you did, though thank goodness Mr Togue managed to slow you down before you hit the ground.” She paused. “And it wasn’t yesterday. You’ve been out for three days.”

“What?” Chiân stared at her.

“Follow the wand tip, please,” she moved her wand, glowing slightly, slowly in front of Chiân’s face.

“Did I miss the Halloween feast?”

“You did,” the nurse gave her a sympathetic look, then examined her arms. “You got some nasty big old splinters as well from that broom, but I think we got them all out,” she mused, turning Chiân’s hands over.

Miss Mary Mollis declared that if she was feeling up to it she could probably go down to the great hall for breakfast, but that she ought to come back in the afternoon to check in.

“Mary,” called a different portrait. “Remember the Headmaster wanted a word with the child.”

“Oh good gracious, I had completely forgotten. That’s right, Lordy. Chiân you’ll have to wait here a few more minutes. Babbity, be a dear and go fetch Professor Petrarch for us.” The witch who had snapped at Chiân gave a self-important nod and disappeared again. “I’m going to go check on Peter. Have some water while you wait.” She moved down to the only other occupied bed.

Three days, thought Chiân glumly. She had missed the Halloween feast and blown up a broomstick, not to mention probably looking a right dumbass falling out of the sky when everyone else was so comfortable flying.

She tried to think back to the moment when she had made the broom explode. She remembered the clench in her shoulders and arms when she had seen the thestrals, and she remembered feeling the brute violence of the magic bursting out of her and the broom shattering. She couldn’t for the life of her think why the thestrals had frightened her so much, though.

Chiân frowned, searching through her head. It was as if there was a gap. She could feel her way around it, almost recognising it, like a familiar room in an unfamiliar darkness. A vague feeling of unease made her already grumbling stomach feel a little more troubled. It was almost like there was a hole, but she couldn’t work out what was missing. Unnerved, she tried to distract herself instead.

Chiân was just wondering if they would make her pay for the broom when the headmaster appeared, with Mrs Pemberton closely in tow. He smiled when he spotted Chiân. She sat up as they approached.

“Good morning, Miss Maeroris,” he said jovially and sat on the end of the bed. Mrs Pemberton remained standing.

“Hello, Sir.”

“How are you feeling?”

“Fine, thank you, Sir.” She looked between the two of them. “Am I in trouble?”

Mrs Pemberton smiled. “Not at all, Chiân, don’t worry.”

“We’re here to talk to you about what happened on Tuesday,” said Petrarch gently. Chiân nodded, relieved.

“Now, your classmates, Masters Kyril Rimsky-Goddard and Asher Shackrel, were kind enough to give us their version of events, namely that ‘you were playing catch, then the broom exploded, then you fell’. But it was Miss Kilpatrick-Tengore who gave us food for thought.”

“Tiffany,” added Mrs Pemberton, smiling at Chiân’s blank look.

“Oh.”

“Quite. ‘Tiff’”, said Petrarch. “She told us that you saw something and that it was this which gave you a fright. She was unsure what it was, though. We were wondering if you might be able to tell us.”

Mrs Pemberton sat down now as well. They were both scrutinising her.

“Er,” Chiân felt like she really might be too hungry for this conversation, but also that she probably didn’t have much of a choice. “I saw some thestrals. They were flying out of the forest.” She looked at her hands as she spoke.

There was a silence.

“Aha,” said the headmaster softly.

Chiân caught the meaningful look between them. “Professor, sir, I know why I can see thestrals, but I don’t find them scary. I mean, they aren’t what frightened me…” She paused, thinking that maybe she would just sound crazy if she voiced her suspicions.

“Go on, Chiân,” Mrs Pemberton encouraged.

Chiân drew herself up and looked Petrarch square in the eye. “I think… the thing that frightened me has gone missing. From my head.”

Petrarch gave her a completely unreadable and very penetrating look. He was not smiling now. “What makes you say that?”

“It’s like… it’s like there’s this blank space, and I can feel that it’s in part of my brain that’s… like, it’s a part I don’t like to go to, and I feel like it’s very big, but I can’t reach it. I know that sounds stupid,” she added quickly.

“Not at all,” he said, while Mrs Pemberton said “You know it doesn’t, Chiân.”

“Yeah, I mean, I was thinking about what you said, Miss, about Psychomancy and being able to take out memories and stuff. Do you think it… do you think someone has taken my memory?”

Quite instead of laughing at her or telling her that that wasn’t how it worked, the two exchanged another glance, and then Petrarch smiled at her. “You are remarkably sharp, Miss Maeroris. And, I am amazed to say, quite correct.”

Chiân gaped at him.

Mrs Pemberton spoke. “We weren’t going to tell you for a while, but I suppose we should have known you’d notice. It is, after all, your head.” She smiled apologetically.

“You’ve taken my memory?” Chiân sounded angrier than she had expected to. This was quite bewildering.

“Just one, Chiân. Just one memory. Though,” he nodded once “Penelope is correct. It is quite a significant one and you are right to notice its absence.”

“That’s – you-“ Chiân was spluttering a little in disbelief, and finally settled on an incredulous “ _why?”_

“Because, while are you are not a full obscurial, you have twice now exhibited some severe magical deformation. That’s not reflection of you at all, please do not feel ashamed in any way. It is a sign of deep trauma, Chiân, and after the events of last Tuesday we were forced to recognise that leaving you untreated was putting both you and your fellow students at risk.”

The words ‘deformation’ and ‘trauma’ echoed in the gap in Chiân’s head. A cry reared up to answer them: “ _monster, monster, monster”._

Petrarch continued. “We consulted with some of the Healers from the Psychomancy unit at St Mungo’s – er, that’s the Wizarding Hospital – and decided along with them that the best option for you was to try to sever you from the partial obscurus force within you, and the safest way to do that was to remove the memory from which it seemed to emanate.”

“You can… remove the… the obscure thing?”

“Obscurus. Yes,” said Mrs Pemberton.

“It is exceptionally difficult magic. Two Healers kindly gave their time to come aid the process here, actually.”

“That’s why you’ve been unconscious for three days. We thought it best to keep you under.”

“Oh.” Chiân felt dazed. “So… so it’s gone now? The obscurus?”

Petrarch hesitated. “Yes. At least, it is gone from you.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Do you remember, Chiân, what I told you about occlument intransigence?” asked Mrs Pemberton, watching her.

“Um… that memories can misbehave, or something?”

“Exactly. A true obscurial has suffered such abuse that their mind is essentially acting against them. The obscurus is the manifestation of the will to self-sabotage, an internalisation of the repeated message that their abilities are bad, or dangerous. It is no longer the child themselves, but it is in a very important sense made of the child’s own memories and magic.”

Chiân looked at her blankly. “Are you saying my magic is gone?”

She shook her head. “No. See, a witch or wizard’s memory only contributes to their magical abilities.”

“Which is also why you will improve at spellwork and suchlike the more you practice,” added Petrarch in a slightly patronising way.

“Yes – the memory of magic is not simply a copy but contains a sort of imprint of the magic itself. It builds up over time, meaning that the more magic you perform the more accurate and refined, and I suppose in a sense, powerful, that magic will become. The memory that has been removed from you was a memory of very potent and very ruptured magic. Hopefully by removing it we have removed all ruptured magical force from you as well, but that is only one part of what gives you your abilities.”

“So… the bit of me which, um, explodes… is gone?”

“Yes.”

“And so is the memory,” Chiân added slowly. It wasn’t a question. The thought was deeply disturbing.

“We have not so far been successful in separating the corrupted magic from the memory,” admitted Professor Petrarch. “We are hopeful, though.”

“Once we have successfully removed the obscurus it will be very straightforward to return the memory to you.” Mrs Pemberton smiled as if this should be reassuring.

Chiân stared at them. “Let me get this straight. You’ve taken a traumatic memory out of my head, and are trying to, like, edit it so that it’s less traumatic, and then you’re going to give it back to me?”

“Essentially, yes.”

Petrarch seemed to spot her growing outrage. “Chiân, in almost no other circumstances would we have attempted this. Tampering with another witch or wizard’s memories is extremely dangerous and almost always illicit. There are, however, a few very important exceptions, and obscurials – even partial ones – are the notable ones.” He was giving her a stern glare.

“This must be a lot for you to take in,” said Mrs Pemberton gently. Chiân nodded. “How are you feeling?”

“Um… hungry, if I’m honest.”

The headmaster chuckled. “Well then, if you don’t have any further questions we should get you down to breakfast.”

“There is one last thing,” Mrs Pemberton said, halting him. She looked at Chiân with a severity which was almost frightening. “Chiân, externalising a memory – like I showed you last month – is not to remove all traces of it from your head. The hole it has left will be like a wound for a time, and I must ask you very seriously not to scratch it. Do you understand?”

Slowly Chiân nodded. “Um, Mrs Pemberton?”

“Yes?”

“What happens if I do?”

They shared a long, heavy look. At last she answered. “I don’t know.”

Chiân respected her more in that moment than she had all term.

The two of them implored her to come to them with any questions she might have, and Mrs Pemberton assured her that their sessions together would be continuing from next Friday, and they walked her down to the Entrance Hall for breakfast.

There was a shout from behind her.

“Hey, Chiân!” it was Becky from the train and two of her friends. Chiân recognised one of them as the Gryffindor seeker, Mia.

“Hello,” Chiân smiled and waited for them as they crossed the hall.

“How you doing, kid?” said Becky, giving her an unexpected hug. Chiân guessed that they had heard what happened on the Quidditch pitch.

“Is it true you blew up a broom?” the other girl asked.

“Um, yes. I didn’t mean to, though.”

They looked impressed.

“That’s got to be bloody difficult to do,” said Mia. “Broomsticks are notoriously difficult to destroy.”

“They are?” said Chiân.

“Well they have to be, don’t they?” said Becky.

“Yeah, I mean they’re so heavily enchanted – and it’s nearly impossible to tamper with the magic in them,” Mia explained.

“And look at the match the other day.” The other girl said. “Fraser flew straight into Courtney after she smacked Oz in the face and damn near broke his neck, but their brooms were fine.”

“Is he okay, by the way?” asked Chiân, remembering the moment all too clearly.

Mia chuckled as they entered the Great Hall. “He’s fine. Refused to let Togue fix it, actually.”

“Boys wear their Quidditch fouls like a badge of honour,” said Becky to Chiân, rolling her eyes in a fond sort of way.

A few yells indicated that Chiân had been spotted. Tiffany reached her first from the Gryffindor table and threw her arms around her.

“Oh my God, Chiân are you okay? Oh my God-“

“I’m fine, Tiff, hi,” Chiân smiled at her as she let go. She waved at Asher and the other Gryffindors who were watching her concernedly. The fifth years had left her and sat down with their friends.

Vessy and Lydia ran up, both excitedly forgetting to ask her if she was okay and telling her loudly that she had been the talk of the school all week.

“Great,” Chiân rolled her eyes, grinning, but then she spotted someone. “Hang on you guys, I’ll join you in a moment. Yeah, I’m fine, just want to talk to someone.”

The girls hung back and Chiân walked down the Gryffindor table to a group of older students, a few of whom recognised her.

“Hey, Chiân. How you doing?” said Han, giving her a surprised smile as she sat down next to him. “Um, Carmen, Sora, this is Chiân-“

“We know,” said one of the girls. “The kid that stole Potter.”

“Destroyed any more school property recently?” chuckled the other one.

Chiân ignored them. She was intent upon the boy sitting opposite Han.

“Hey, Gale.”

“Hey, Chiân,” he looked quizzically at her. “You alright?”

“Can I ask you a question?” she said meaningfully.

“Uh, sure.” He followed her lead and scooted a few feet away from the others. Chiân grabbed a piece of toast from a rack as they moved, unable to stand the hunger. “What’s up?”

She chewed for a second, wondering how to phrase it. “You can see thestrals too,” she said finally.

He sighed. “Yeah, I can.” He seemed to understand what she wanted to know, but she asked anyway.

“If you don’t mind me asking, who did you… um, who died?”

He was looking away as he answered. “My brother. It was a car crash when I was thirteen. Nobody’s fault.”

Chiân knew he was going to ask in return, and after a few minutes of thick silence he did.

“How about you?”

“That’s just the thing,” Chiân said, finishing her toast. “I can’t remember.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> An audio recording of this chapter can be found here:
> 
> https://soundcloud.com/kristin-briggs/chapter-eight-bed-talks-and-broomsticks-audio-recording/s-tKomqkFJJW3


	9. Things Unseen

Chiân had not mentioned her troubles with wands and broomsticks in any of her letters to her father. A few weeks out from the Christmas break, on a grey Sunday afternoon, she was lying on a beanbag in the common room, staring absently out into the lake, a half-written letter on her lap.

She’d written that she had signed up to stay in the castle over Christmas, and about how she had won twenty points for Slytherin from Professor Meyerbeer for pointing out that one of the bowtruckles they had been observing was in fact a twig. Their Care of Magical Creatures teacher was a very jolly older fellow whom her dad liked hearing about because he had also been taught by him back in the day.

She wasn’t sure what else she could add to the letter without sounding like she was being deliberately vague, which she would have to be if she didn’t tell him about the memory and the thestrals. It seemed a lot to ask, though, to try to write about something that was literally no longer in her memory.

Lydia was sat beside her trying to write an essay for Professor Schnittke on the benefits of using healing draughts instead of spells. She was struggling.

“What did Schnittke say about, uh, organic synth-a-thing?” she asked Chiân.

“Organic synthesis,” she answered absently. “Organic potions ingredients and things are made of the same stuff as human body stuff. It’s a disproved theory about potions being better for you than healing spells because magic’s alien to the body and organic ingredients aren’t.”

One of the fourth years was playing the piano loudly. It made the afternoon chatter of the room feel even fuller.

“It’s been disproved?”

“Yeah. Like two hundred years ago by some warlocks or something.”

Lydia looked at her parchment. “Oh. Well that rules out my only decent point so far.” She sighed heavily and screwed up the essay.

“You can read mine if you want, Lydia,” said Egan.

“Thanks – where you going?”

Chiân had stood up. “Library. Need to think.” She rolled up her letter to her dad and grabbed her ink and quill. It had been annoying to find out that not only did her earphones not work in Hogwarts but none of her pens did either. Tiff from Gryffindor was also muggle-born and had told her that her favourite fountain pen had blown a raspberry at her and run off when she tried to write with it.

Chiân didn’t mind the quills anymore but was still desperately missing listening to music. She started towards the library, docs thumping loudly in the empty corridors, thinking sadly about her unchargeable phone.

The library was reasonably full of tables and quietly murmuring students. She walked slowly through them until someone caught her eye, waving. Asher and Tiff were sat with a few of the other Gryffindors. She joined them, sliding into a free seat next to Asher.

“You alright?” whispered Tiffany.

“Yeah, just pre-occupied.”

“With what?”

“Death,” said Chiân, truthfully.

Asher chuckled a bit too loudly and summoned from nowhere the short, lumpy librarian, Timmins, who hissed at him to keep it down.

Chiân had a sudden inspiration. “Um, excuse me – sir, excuse me,” Chiân got back up from her seat, catching his attention.

“Yes?” he said curtly. For someone who worked in a school, Timmins did not seem to like children very much.

“Do you have any books on Psychomancy?”

He looked at her suspiciously. She was nearly a foot taller than him but he still managed to command a superior sense of snobbishness. “What for?”

“Er, homework.”

He seemed to know she was lying. “They are in the restricted Section, which requires a teacher’s note,” he said sniffily. “Until such time as you can present me with one of those, I’m afraid it’s quite impossible to show you.”

“Great,” said Chiân brightly, which made him scowl even harder.

Chiân got a signed note from Professor Wexel the very next day in Charms class. He had warmed up to her significantly since she had started using her wand. It had turned out that she was quite proficient at spell work and quickly caught up with those at the top of the class, successfully levitating Vessy’s entire school bag on her second try.

Vessy and Lydia had asked her curiously why she had been so nervous about using a wand, but Chiân couldn’t answer. She just knew that the nervousness was gone now, replaced with the same eagerness to learn that she felt in her potions class.

She had been trying, as Mrs Pemberton asked her in every counselling session, to avoid looking too closely at the hole in her memory, but had quietly decided that this did not extend to reading up on Psychomancy in her spare time.

Chiân brought the signed permission slip straight to the library after lessons that Wednesday. Timmins had been grumpy about it, but had led her all the same through the thick maroon ropes. They walked for at least ten minutes, Chiân staring around her. This part of the library was almost deserted and most of the towering alleyways of books were in complete darkness.

“Here you are,” he said, stopping and gesturing down a passageway. “Psychomancy.”

“Er, thanks,” she peered into the darkness and pulled out her wand, but as she stepped forwards the lamps flickered into life.

Much to Chiân’s annoyance Timmins stayed to supervise her while she browsed. The books were fascinating, though, and she took out as many as she could carry, staggering back to the main study area with no fewer than six.

Egan, Kyril, and Benji looked at her in astonishment as she thumped them loudly onto the table, earning a hiss from the scowling librarian.

“Sorry,” she whispered as he slunk off into the shelves.

“What’s all that for?” gaped Kyril.

Benji had twisted his head to read the titles. “ _, ‘Psychomancy and the common myth of power’, ‘The Rebirth of Memory: a study of the dead’, ‘The Might and Magic of the Mutilated Mind’ –_ Jesus Christ.”

Lydia and Vessy reacted similarly.

“What the hell are you reading?” said Lydia when she came up to the dorm that night, already pulling off her robes.

Chiân showed her.

“Jesus, why?”

“Been thinking about brains,” she said shortly. She wasn’t interested in explaining herself at that moment. She had just come across a very interesting passage in ‘ _Psychomancy and the common myth of power’._

“ _Advancements in Wandlore have led to the development of Psychomantic practice in the last century. Guavor Sejora’s studies of the resonances of wand-cores amongst magic and non-magic peoples are fundamental to sketches of the human-magical cortex. The mapping of magical thought and the practice of longitudinal cerebral patterning rest upon this discovery of the balance between physical matter and magical insubstance.”_

“Chiân,” Vessy whined. “Can’t you read it tomorrow? The light is bothering me.”

Chiân snapped the book shut, irritated, and went downstairs to the common room. She kept reading until nearly two a.m., though she didn’t understand much of it, until the chatter of the older students eventually irritated her into going to bed.

She had better luck over the Christmas holidays, when the common room was significantly quieter. Both Lydia and Vessy had gone home, leaving her free to read until the early hours of the morning, the various denizens of the aquarium keeping her company.

She had decided not to mention anything to her dad in her letter, instead including two Christmas cards to make up for the brevity. One card was to her parents, which included a tentative olive branch of friendliness to her mum, and the other was to her brother, whom she was feeling guilty about not contacting all term.

The Halloween decorations had been cool, but the castle decorations for Christmas were absolutely stunning. Chiân had taken to wandering through the upper corridors, which were several degrees warmer than the dungeons, basking in it in her free slices of time. In every available corner were enormous pine trees adorned in bright balls of light and little creatures which looked like they might be real fairies. The suits of armour all wore santa hats and beards, as did Peeves the Poltergeist, who had taken it upon himself to hurl baubles at unsuspecting students.

On one of these wanders, only three days before Christmas, she found that she had stumbled back upon the fat lady who concealed the entrance to the Gryffindor common room.

“Oi, broomstick girl!” came a shout from behind her.

Chiân’s frown at the name became a grin when she turned. It was Ozzy. “Hey, nosebleed boy.”

“Touché,” he grinned. “What you doing up here?”

“Looking for something else to steal.”

“Wanna come in?” He turned to the fat lady. “Pigglesticks.”

“Quite,” she said tartly, clearly disapproving of Chiân but swinging open anyway.

The Gryffindor common room was significantly quieter with most of them gone. Asher, Dory, and another first year called Cara waved at her excitedly. They were watching some fourth years play gobstones. Chiân joined them on the floor.

Most of the fifth years had gone, but Becky and Theo were still around. Ozzy waved Theo over to say hi.

They teased her for a few minutes about blowing up broomsticks. Then Theo asked, “hey, the rumour going around is that you’re an obscurus. Is that true?”

“It’s an ‘obscurial’. The force is the obscurus,” said a voice behind her. Chiân glanced up at Mia, who had just sat down in the chair beside Theo. Another fifth year introduced himself as Wallace. They were all looking at her intently.

She glanced at the other first years, who were still immersed in the game, and turned away so they wouldn’t hear.

“I don’t think so. At least not entirely.” She found herself explaining the conversation she had had with the headmaster and Mrs Pemberton in the hospital wing. She hadn’t quite meant to go into so much detail, but it was the first time she had really spoken about it since it happened.

“Wait, they’ve got one of your memories?” said Ozzy in amazement.

Chiân nodded. “They’re trying to separate it from the obscurus – or, partial obscurus or something.”

“Fucking hell.”

“I wonder about the ethics of that,” said Mia, looking into the fire.

“What do you mean?” asked Wallace.

She glanced at Chiân before answering. “I mean like, it’ll be a different memory by the time they give it back to her, won’t it? Isn’t that memory-tampering?”

“I guess it would be,” said Theo.

“And that’s definitely illegal.”

“Um,” Chiân interrupted. “Professor Petrarch said that there were exceptions in the case of obscurials.”

“Obscuria,” corrected Mia.

“How do you know so much about it?” asked Ozzy.

She rolled her eyes. “Gale’s doing his finals thesis on them, remember?”

“Wait, Gale? In seventh year?” said Chiân.

“Yeah, he’s my boyfriend.” She grinned a little. Then she sighed at Chiân’s expression. “Yes, we’ve talked about you.”

Ozzy chuckled and Theo elbowed him. “This is a sensitive subject, Oscar.”

“Chiân’s chill about it – aren’t you, broomstick girl?”

But Chiân wasn’t listening. “Did Gale tell you I can see thestrals?” she asked Mia.

Mia nodded. “Yeah, said you were really good with animals, actually.”

Chiân glowed.

“What are thester- uh, what?”

“Honestly, Oz, pay attention for once in your goddamn life,” Mia sighed. “They’re the winged horses that pull the carriages.”

Ozzy looked blankly at her. “I thought they were pulled by magic?”

Wallace and Theo both snorted.

“So, what, they’re invisible horses, then?”

“Yes, unless you’ve seen someone die,” said Mia darkly, which shut them all up.

Something was bothering Chiân. She was thinking of her brother, and the moments over the past years when she had forced him to become invisible to hide him from their mother. It had been very easy to do – only taking a slight push of concentration. But the visibility of the thestrals was altered not by the state of the creatures themselves but by the people looking at them. The phrase ‘the eye of the beholder’ swam up into her mind.

“Chiân, why do you suddenly look like you’re trying to take a shit?” said Ozzy, interrupting something Wallace was saying about Gale.

Chiân was staring furiously at the back of Tiffany’s head, concentrating with all her might. Her wand was in her pocket but she did not pull it out. She had not tried to do magic without it since the morning she had woken up in the hospital wing. She had not seen the point – it was so much easier with a wand.

With a gasp of frustration Chiân had to give up. Tiffany was just as visible as before. Chiân had had no effect on her whatsoever.

“Are you okay, Chiân?” said Theo, leaning forward on the chair.

“I used to be able to make my brother invisible,” said Chiân. She was feeling deeply uneasy. Every time she tried to pinpoint why she found herself face to face with the gap in her memory.

“Really?”

“Like without a wand?”

“God, I still haven’t got over you levitating Potter without a wand. Insanely cool,” said Mia.

Chiân was remembering a dinnertime several years ago, back with her parents. It had been one of the rare weekends when Tian was at home. Their mother hadn’t bothered making enough food for him. Chiân remembered exchanging a stormy look with him when she only brought out three plates. She had shook her head at her brother to try to stop him making a scene, and as her mum had turned around Chiân had quickly focused and pushed Tian out of sight, making him vanish into thin air, though she knew he was there. She thought she remembered him leaving in a bad mood to go get chips or something, but maybe he had still been invisible.

Ozzy was asking her if they were ever going to get their bust of Harry Potter back, but Chiân interrupted him.

“Is there a spell that can make people invisible?”

“Er,” said Theo.

“Like a disillusionment charm?” suggested Wallace.

“A what?”

“A disillusionment charm. Makes you – not really invisible, but you, like, blend into the background.”

“Well, a really powerful one would make you pretty much invisible,” countered Mia.

“Can you teach me?” said Chiân.

“Er, I can’t do one-“

“I bet Carmen can. She’s doing the Defence Against the Dark Arts NEWT.” Mia called over a curly haired seventh year whom Chiân recognised from when she had spoken with Gale those many weeks ago.

Carmen raised her eyebrows at the request, but said “sure”. Within ten minutes Chiân was standing face to face with Tiffany and repeating the incantation Carmen had shown her, tapping Tiffany’s head with her wand and trying to make her blend into the wall of the common room behind her. Tiff kept giggling, saying that it felt like something was dribbling into her hair. Occasionally bits of her body would fade in and out into different colours, reminding Chiân of the demiguise she had befriended.

It took less than an hour for Chiân to nail it completely. Most of the common room was invested by that point and Tiffany took a bow to much applause once Chiân also managed to restore her.

Carmen was impressed. “That’s a reasonably tricky spell, that one. Aren’t you in first year?”

“I’m gifted,” said Chiân slyly, then quickly thanked Carmen. She went to sit back down with the fifth years, and Tiffany followed her.

“What was that about?” asked Theo when she sat back down.

Something in Chiân’s face made the rest break off their conversations about homework and look at her.

Chiân took a deep breath. “I don’t know what I was doing to my brother but I don’t think I was turning him invisible. I think… I think something is going on, but I can’t remember what.”

Tiffany touched her arm with a reassuring expression. “It’s okay,” she said.

“It’s not,” said Chiân. She felt frightened. The disillusionment charm had involved a lot of careful concentration on colour and motion, and upon perception and sight. It had involved a very specific kind of mental movement, bending what was in front of her into some other quality, then unleashing it over Tiffany.

It was nothing like the motion she had remembered from the dinner table, or the time in their bedroom, or coming out of school and getting into the car with their mum, trying to avoid another fit of hysteria on the drive home. That had been like holding in a breath. Chiân was aware that she didn’t know much magic yet, but she wasn’t stupid: different spells required different applications of that internal motion, just as different potions required different ingredients.

“I think I’m gonna head back,” she said suddenly. Tiffany let go of her so she could stand up.

“Do you want one of us to walk you down?” asked Mia.

“No, I’ll be okay,” she said, and thanked them all for letting her hang out. Ozzy yelled after her that she should return the Potter statue post haste and she gave him the middle finger without turning as she climbed out of the portrait hole.

She was very distracted as she walked the long way back to the Slytherin common room. Coming out of a stairwell on the first floor, deep in thought, she shrieked when a figure in a waistcoat and fake santa beard suddenly materialised out of nowhere right in front of her face. It was Peeves.

He was delighted at having made her jump and lost no time in pelting her with baubles. Heart pounding with adrenaline Chiân sprinted away from him with her arms over her head.

Peeves ran out of either baubles or interest by the end of the hallway, but Chiân did not stop running until she had reached the Slytherin common room. She spent the next day reading about Psychomancy to distract herself, only leaving her dorm room for meals.

On Christmas day Chiân awoke feeling relieved, as if she had made it to a checkpoint in a video game.

The dorm room was peaceful, lit by the blue-green light from the aquarium and the silver iridescence of the stars. Chiân lay there for a while, content in the lazy amnesia of a recently awoken conscience. She missed her roommates more than she had expected to, which was a nice feeling.

Upon sitting up she was surprised to find a few brightly coloured parcels at the end of her bed. Delighted, Chiân crawled out of the covers. She recognised her father’s handwriting on one of them, and Vessy’s on another.

Chiân nearly ripped them open immediately, but then thought there was something a bit sad about opening presents on one’s own on Christmas morning.

She got dressed and carried the parcels downstairs to the common room, where she was pleased to find a small group of Slytherins sat around a lit fire pit. Pretoria and Sam were curled up together on a beanbag, watching the flames. Benji was the only other first year who had stayed for Christmas but he didn’t seem to have woken up yet because Chiân couldn’t see him. Nora and another second year called Orias Peche were there, both still in their pyjamas, and Alec, who spotted her first.

They all hailed her cheerfully, even the others whom she did not know so well. Chiân was pleased that she was not the only one who had brought down their gifts. Orias’s older sister Melissa, a fourth year, was showing off a beautiful clockwork bird she had just unwrapped, winding it up and then releasing it into the common room. It soared over their heads, chirping and twinkling. Orias was chewing hard on what looked from the size of his cheeks like an entire handful toffees. He held out the bag, which said ‘Honeydukes’ on it in large, colourful letters, and offered her one as she sat down.

The toffee was delicious. Feeling warm, Chiân tended to her presents.

Vessy, to her great delight, had given her a solid-looking pair of boots which, at the precise flick of an ankle, produced little wheels. She had written excitedly in her card that she’d also got a pair for herself and Lydia, and that she wanted them to practise together when she got back in January. Chiân smiled fondly while Nora examined them, laughing.

She turned over the next present and blinked, startled at the name. It was from Asher. She had not even considered getting him a card, let alone a present. She couldn’t think what it might be, though the shape suggested possibly a small book.

She ripped off the paper, then snorted. It was a framed drawing of her blowing up her broom. The resemblance was very good, and it was bewitched so that the broom kept blowing up and then reassembling itself beneath her. Chiân watched the sketch of herself go from comical scowling to utter shock and then back again for a few seconds.

The card he had included said simply: “highlight of my term. Glad you’re not dead. Asher x”

Chiân blushed a little, very pleased, and found that she couldn’t stop grinning. Pretoria waggled her eyebrows when she showed it to her, earning her a swift middle finger from Chiân.

The last two packages were both from her parents. Because nobody was there to tell her not to, Chiân opened the presents before the card. One gift was a gorgeous navy blue winter coat with faux-fur lining. It looked quite posh but also very warm. Chiân stroked it wonderingly for a second, admiring the quality of the material. The other package was a small hamper of food, including her mother’s homemade quiches, which Chiân loved.

She ate one immediately and found herself tearing up a little bit. It was the taste of home, and meant twice as much because it came from her mum.

She had almost forgotten the card. Finishing her miniature quiche she wiped her fingers on her joggers and reached for the envelope.

A photo of her parents grinning and giving her a thumbs up fluttered out of the card. Chiân smiled at it briefly and then read the card.

“ _Chiâny, your mother and I are so proud of you and how well you’ve done this term. We hope you have a great Christmas at school and that the coat comes in handy up there – I remember how much snow we used to get! Thanks for the cards – it was really touching that you included one for your brother. We miss him too. Enjoy the quiches! Love, mum and dad.”_

Chiân stared. Her body was completely numb.

“Chiân? You okay?” Pretoria called across the circle.

“Hon, you’ve gone completely white,” said Sam, rising quickly from her girlfriend’s lap.

_‘It was really touching that you included one for your brother. We miss him too.’_

Sam crouched in front of her, concern twisting the half of her face which wasn’t scarred beyond movement.

Chiân was searching for words. Her head was in a confusion of chaos. “I need to see Professor Petrarch. Right now.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> An audio recording of this chapter can be found here:
> 
> https://soundcloud.com/kristin-briggs/chapter-nine-things-unseen-audio-recording/s-43lYEH1pQ80


	10. Icy Turns

Chiân had run from the common room before anyone could stop her. Sam called after her in alarm but Chiân was through the passageway up to the corridor before the words had left her mouth.

She ran out of breath as she climbed the stairs. She was barefoot again, not stopping to get shoes. She was thankful for the increase in warmth as she rose up through the castle, though the flagstones beneath her feet remained cold.

Chiân had a reasonably good sense of direction and managed to find her way to the headmaster’s office without getting lost.

She stood for a second, panting. The card from her parents was still clenched in her hand.

“Begonias,” she said to the griffin. It did not move.

“Ah shit,” she said. The password for the Slytherin common rooms had changed twice over the course of a term. It made sense that this one had too. “Uh, peonies... roses? Daisies?” Chiân couldn’t think of any other flowers. Perhaps the new password wasn’t even a flower.

“He’s not in,” said a jovial voice from behind her. She turned, looking for the speaker. A wizard with a long white beard was peering at her out of a painting of a mountain-scape.

“Fuck’s sake,” said Chiân distractedly, looking up and down the corridor as if Petrarch might round a corner at any second.

“Language, Miss Maeroris,” said the figure, a slight sternness in his voice.

“Sorry,” she said without meaning it. Then looked back at the wizard. “Do you know where he is?”

“Well,” the wizard adjusted his hat with one hand and Chiân noticed he was holding a whole pile of cauldron cakes. Apparently the Hogwarts paintings got hungry. “It is Christmas morning, which I believe he spends with his mother and siblings.” The wizard smiled at her.

Chiân’s stomach sank. “You mean he’s not in the castle?”

“Not at the moment, no. Is something the matter?”

“Yeah,” she said absently. “Is Mrs Pemberton here?”

“Penelope does not live in the castle,” said the wizard, sounding surprised. “She lives in the village, with her husband and two children.”

“Oh.” Chiân sank to the floor, her back against the wall opposite the painting.

The wizard seemed to take pity on her. “If you like, Miss Maeroris, I could tell you the password and you could wait in Professor Petrarch’s office? He shall be back within the hour, I expect. I would offer you a cauldron cake, but, er, I’m not sure it’s possible.” He looked down at the cakes in his arms.

“How do you know my name?” said Chiân.

“I am one of the previous headmasters of this school, and occupy one of the paintings in Guilliame’s office.”

Chiân grunted.

“You have been the cause of quite some discussion, I must say. Horace tells me that you have given that bust of Harry Potter a new home down in the dungeons.”

“Who?”

“Horace Slughorn – his portrait hangs in your common rooms. We are old friends. In fact,” the wizard beamed at her, “I am just on my way to join him and several other fellows in that rather marvellous painting of the tavern on the fourth floor. We are having Christmas brunch.” His half-moon spectacles twinkled. “The password is ‘Rhododendrons’. Merry Christmas, Miss Maeroris.”

And off he trotted, disappearing behind a mountain.

Chiân watched him go, wondering how on earth the magic in the portraits worked here. She got to her feet and turned back to the griffin, which had already stepped aside.

“I heard,” it said in a bored voice.

“Oh. Er, thanks,” said Chiân, and hurried up the staircase.

She had to argue with the wood nymph on the door for a minute, but she let her in when Chiân threatened to kick down the door with her bare feet.

The office was warm and peaceful, the plush carpet feeling kind on her cold feet. Chiân sat in the only chair she could see, which was the one behind the desk. She read the card from her father again.

Up here in the light and certainty of Petrarch’s office it was easier to feel calm and think clearly about it.

_“We miss him too.”_

It made it sound like Tian was dead. Chiân thought again of the thestrals, and the horrible premonition in her stomach hardened a little more.

Her eyes fell upon the Sorting Hat, high on its shelf.

“What are you looking at,” she said bitterly.

To her utter shock, it responded. “You.”

“Alright then. I’ve got a question for you.” Chiân stood up and walked over to it. “Why did you laugh when you sorted me? What was so funny?”

The hat seemed to give a wicked smile, though it may have been the shadows in its crinkled, twisted folds. “Slytherin house has suffered a great stripping back of its pride since the days of noble Salazar himself. There was even some talk of getting rid of the house entirely, after the Dark Lord fell. But the traditions have continued on, waiting for someone who could restore the name to glory. But you are not what they were expecting, no indeed.”

Chiân stared at it. None of this made any sense to her and she was about to say something rude when suddenly a fire sprang to life in the grate.

Chiân moved away quickly, staring at the tall green flames. They were leaping and roiling strangely – almost into the shape of a human – and then Professor Petrarch stepped out of the fireplace, ducking to avoid hitting his head on the mantelpiece.

“I – sir – what?”

“Miss Maeroris, what a pleasure to see you,” he said merrily, brushing soot from his royal blue robes. “How ever did you get in?”

“Er, one of your paintings told me the password,” Chiân gestured vaguely. The frames up here were all empty.

“Ah,” he frowned slightly. “I shall have to have a word with them about security. Again. What can I do for you on this most festive of mornings, dear?”

He beamed at her, moving around to sit at the desk and quite literally drawing a chair out of thin air for her with his wand.

Chiân sat. “Um, I got this card from my parents, sir.” She held it out and he took it from her, smiling at the penguins on the front.

“How lovely.”

“Yeah, but it says on the inside, um…” she paused while he read it quickly. “Well, it makes it sound like my brother’s dead, doesn’t it?”

His expression was sharp as he surveyed her for a moment. “Is he?”

Chiân stared at him. “I don’t know,” she said eventually. “Sir, I was wondering if the memory – the one you took out of my head, I mean – I was wondering if that was about him.”

He looked at her for a moment more, then sighed. “I’m not sure it’s a very good idea to discuss this, Chiân. There are a lot of unknown quantities in your situation, and I think Mrs Pemberton’s advice was wise.”

Chiân couldn’t believe that this was his attitude. “You’ve got to be kidding, sir.”

He frowned. “I am not ‘kidding’, Miss Maeroris, and that is not the tone you ought to be taking with your headmaster.”

“Sorry,” she said quickly. “But, I mean – it’s my memory, isn’t it? And if I can’t remember if my own brother is dead… I just think I deserve to know, that’s all.” She said, realising that she’d probably overstepped the line a little and trying to walk it back.

“I agree you have a right to know, but I’m not sure that you are quite ready to hear what is in that memory-“

“Wait, have you seen it?”

“I would appreciate it if you did not interrupt me again, Miss Maeroris.” He definitely sounded stern. “Yes, I have seen the memory. No, I do not think it sensible or appropriate to tell you the nature of its contents. Frankly, I am a little concerned that you have been dwelling on this matter so carelessly. It would be best for you, I think, if you were to put it out of mind for now, as Mrs Pemberton suggested.”

Chiân’s eyebrows were raised so high she thought they might leave her face. “With all due respect, sir, this is my brother-“

“And with all reciprocal courtesy, I think you would do well to trust me that we have your best interests at heart here.” He looked almost angry with her, but she did not shrink from his gaze. “I know this is hard, and I know that you are feeling disturbed about your brother, but please listen to me when I tell you there is nothing you can do at the present time.”

Chiân didn’t know if it was because she was feeling so outraged or whether he actually was a patronising old fool, but his tone felt almost as insulting as the words he was saying.

There was an uncomfortable silence in which Chiân deliberately did not apologise.

“I am going to dismiss you, Miss Maeroris, on the condidtion that you take the rest of today to enjoy the festivities and the Christmas feast and put out of your mind any worries you might have about other matters.” He smiled benignly, and Chiân decided that it wasn’t just her – he was definitely being patronising.

She got up to leave, thanking him bluntly for his time. As she walked towards the door, however, Professor Petrarch made a mistake.

“Chiân,”

“Yes, professor?”

“Do not go searching for the memory. It is safe, and the castle can be very dangerous to those who go wandering where they are not supposed to.”

“I understand, sir, thank you.” She nodded to him and made her way down the staircase. As soon as she was out of sight of the headmaster a slow and cheerless grin spread across her face.

So. It was in the castle.

By the time she got back to the common room the grin had solidified into a determined grimace which did not leave her face for the rest of the morning.

In fact, she looked so stormy that lunchtime during the Christmas day feast that everybody around her kept asking what was wrong. There were around a hundred students and most of the staff still in the Castle, so they all sat along the two middle tables of the Great Hall. It was much more snug than usual, which meant that Chiân had difficulty hiding how she was feeling.

“Look, Maeroris, either start talking or quit scowling before you blow something else up,” said Pretoria, putting down her spoon during pudding.

“Pret,” Sam chastised her, but it had made Chiân laugh. She agreed to tell them later, but didn’t want to do it in the common room. She had had rather enough of the entire school talking about her.

Sam and Pretoria agreed. After the feast the three of them went down to the common room to get hats and coats, and left the Castle for a walk around the grounds.

It had been snowing for the past several nights and a loud group of students were having a snowball fight out by the frozen lake. Chiân was very cozy in her new coat. She found it a comfort as she told the two sixth years everything from the day she had woken up in hospital to the frustrating conversation with Professor Petrarch that morning.

As she spoke they reached a stone bench overlooking the vast frozen lake and the students playing in the snow. Pretoria melted the snow from the bench with her wand. Chiân sat down beside the two girls, appreciating them for listening and for warming up the bench beneath her.

“Fucking hell, kid,” said Pretoria when she finished.

“He just said no? Like, didn’t even consider telling you what was in your _own memory?_ ” said Sam, looking disgusted.

Chiân nodded grumpily and watched someone who was probably Ozzy pick up a girl who was screaming and laughing. He started spinning her around very fast, then released her in the direction of the lake. She slid a long way out onto the ice, which they all seemed to think was uproariously funny.

“He did say one last thing to me, as I was leaving. He told me not to bother looking for it because the ‘castle’s dangerous when you go places you’re not supposed to’, or something,” said Chiân, dripping with contempt.

“But that sounds like –“

“It’s in the castle somewhere, yeah.” Chiân nodded, watching the girl’s friends slip and slide out to meet her on the ice, cackling to each other in the lightly falling snow.

“Well, then,” said Pretoria in a decided kind of way. “Sounds to me like we have a heist to plan.”

Chiân grinned up at her. “I was hoping you’d say that. Thing is, where do you even start? This place is just massive.”

Sam was thinking. “I know a tracking charm we might be able to use,” she said.

“You do?” Pretoria looked at her, surprised.

“Yeah, um, it’s a charm you can use to find bits of something that’s broken. You only have to put the spell on one piece of it and it will glow brighter if it gets near the other bits of itself.”

Pretoria raised her eyebrows and the unscarred half of Sam’s face went slightly pink, matching her hair. “Look, I was going to make us a pair of soul-stone necklaces which would glow when we were near each other, but then, er, I forgot.”

Pretoria laughed and kissed her. “Sounds like a disgusting idea, thanks for not doing it.”

Sam elbowed her but grinned bashfully. Then looked back at Chiân. “Thing is though, it only works on like, magical substances. I don’t know if it would work on a person.”

“And it’s not like we’d be using it to find a missing toenail or something – it probably wouldn’t work on memories, right?”

Chiân was thinking of what she’d been reading in her Psychomancy books. “Actually-“

“Yeah, probably not. I think it’s mostly meant for like dragonhide or broken bits of a portkey or something.”

“We could try a summoning charm?” said Pretoria.

“Guys-“

“That’ll never work. They’ll have put enchantments up just in case-“

“GUYS.” Both girls shut up and looked at Chiân. “I _am_ a magical substance.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I am a magical substance. So are both of you. Magic isn’t something you have inside you like a tooth or something – it’s one of the qualities of what you actually physically are. People with magic abilities have like an extra dimension to the stuff they’re made of, just like any other organic magic substance. It’s called, uh, ‘inchoate physical aggrandisement’.” Chiân didn’t really know what these last words meant but she had been reading about it just the other evening and thought this had sounded very impressive. “Memories and thoughts and stuff can only be taken out of your head and messed with because they are already, like, _real_. You’re not making a memory physical when you take it out of your head – you’re just moving it.”

They stared at her.

“Jesus, you’re a fucking nerd.” Pretoria snorted. “How do you know all this shit?”

“Er, been doing some reading.”

“How come you’re not in Ravenclaw?” said Sam with genuine puzzlement on her face. Chiân shrugged, thinking of the sorting hat. She scowled again. Sassy, talking, glorified sack.

“Are you saying it would work, then? I guess, if your thoughts are physical things made up of magical substance you’d definitely be able to put this charm on them, wouldn’t you?”

“I think so,” said Chiân.

“How sure are you?”

“Pretty sure.” And she was. The Psychomancy books she had taken out of the library were dense and difficult, and at times completely incomprehensible, but there were bits which had seemed clear to her. It seemed to make intuitive sense, for instance, that the quality of being magical was a property just as colour or density was a property. She had mass, she had substance, and she had magic. That was why she had been able to do magic a long time before she got a wand, and it was also why wands made magic easier. It was just simple chemical reaction.

The couple were arguing again about whether there was any point using Sam’s charm on her thoughts because it wasn’t like they’d be able to see her memories glowing.

Pretoria was just laughing at the image of Chiân having to walk around with her mouth open so they could see if her brain was lighting up when there was an almighty crack from the lake below them. Immediately the screams became cries of panic rather than mischief.

All three Slytherin girls leapt to their feet. The girl who had been flung out onto the ice was standing in a crouch, arms out for balance. Around her in a wide circle the ice had split. There were a couple other students out there with her and two smaller figures were clinging to each other, sliding around as the ice beneath them moved. They were caught on a separated chunk of ice which was wobbling dangerously, then, as one of them slipped, beginning to tip. Pretoria and Sam took off at a run towards the other students by the shore.

Without stopping to think and without reaching for her wand, stuck somewhere deep inside many layers of coat and jumper, Chiân flung out her arms. She drew up from within her a force which felt like heavy bass, too deep and too loud to hear. Barely able to see through the pounding thunder in her head, Chiân reached towards the two girls now falling from the tipping ice, and moved.

It was like trying to master a thousand kites in a storm, bending them against the wind and down to pick the two people out of the water. Letting out a scream of sheer brute effort, Chiân forced the water out of the way. It exploded in a spray of frozen debris twenty feet into the air. Amidst the roar rose two shapes. Chiân, arms shaking and rigid, snatched at them, and pulled.

The two Gryffindor girls hurtled into the others, colliding head on. They all skidded backwards, careening back to land. The students on land were helping those who were still stuck out on the ice to make it back to safety. Still at the top of the bank and now alone, Chiân fell backwards onto the bench, shaking from head to foot and gasping with exertion.

Nobody had seen. She lay back numbly for a few minutes, watching the students hug each other and fret over the younger ones.

Chiân had no idea what had just happened. It had felt a lot like the same rush of power and magic which had destroyed all the windows of the transfiguration classroom, or blown up the broom beneath her. But that force had been removed, hadn’t it? And anyway that feeling had been violent and uncontrollable. No, this had felt more like strong magic, just like when she had focused on the Gryffindor statue and levitated it all the way down to the Slytherin common room.

But why had she been so panicked by the girls falling into the water? She was certain that she could try with all her might to replicate the magnitude of the magic she had just performed and it would be barely as powerful. Some deep reserve of adrenaline and magic inside her had erupted as the ice had tipped over. It was a feeling which, if she could have put into words, she might have described as ‘ _not again’_.

She stood up gingerly, massaging her wrists and walking down to meet Pretoria and Sam, who trudged with her back up to the castle.

“Idiots,” Pretoria was grumbling. “It’s only been snowing for like three days. Obviously the ice was gonna crack.”

“To be fair, babe, it looked pretty solid. But still, yeah, stupid thing to do.”

“Ahh they’ll be okay. You alright, Chiân?” Pretoria asked her.

“Yeah, I’m fine. What happened?”

“Giant Squid must have thrown them back out of the water or something.” Pretoria shrugged. “Dunno.”

“Probably was the squid – that was a pretty powerful throw. Though I didn’t see it at all,” frowned Sam.

Chiân did not say anything.

The two sixth years were eager to get on with planning their hunt for Chiân’s missing memory, but Chiân was feeling a bit sick. Her head was very full again, playing over and over in her head the image of the ice slowly starting to tip. Something about the moment made her gut wrench. She excused herself from the Slytherins lounging around the fire pits and went up to bed early.

Chiân avoided most people over the next week, often reading in a secluded corner of the library, or sitting at the top of an out-of-the-way staircase and watching the portraits and ghosts meander around on their strange otherworldly ways. In the back of her mind she was searching for some kind of large, obviously locked area that might contain dangerous things like corrupted memories, but she never came across anything which looked like it might be a secret vault. She sorely wished that term would start so that she could go back to the Rubeus House and Gardens. She was missing the animals and the wonder of the botanical walks.

Chiân had also been reading _The Magic and Might of the Mutilated Mind_ , which was largely about creatures called ‘dementors’. It had included detailed studies of people who had been ‘kissed’ by them and the bizarre way they seemed to no longer react to any kind of hex, curse, or enchantment once they had lost their souls. Chiân thought that the dementors’ kiss might be the most horrendous thing she had ever heard of. Nevertheless she successfully used what she proudly thought was a pretty decent disillusionment charm to sneak into the restricted section and find more books on them.

It was two days before the start of term and the day when the rest of the student cohort would be arriving. Chiân was taking advantage of the quiet library to do a bit more browsing in the restricted section. Irritatingly the lamps still turned on for her even if she was reasonably well disguised, so she had taken to doing this in the mornings when the light would make her excursions less obvious.

She was using her wand to pull off a book from a high shelf when she spotted another title beside it: _‘Navigating the Memory Vault: the fires within’._ A connection sprang in her head as she thought of Asher telling them all repeatedly that there was a supposed archive buried deep in the library, full of fire.

Chiân wasn’t particularly interested in this legend, but she couldn’t believe she hadn’t thought to explore further into the library. The areas which were open to the students must be only a tiny portion of what was actually there. Checking that there was nobody anywhere near her, then checking a bit lower for the librarian, Chiân crept further down between the bookshelves.

All the way at the end of the hall was a pair of wide wooden doors. They were locked.

Checking around again and feeling a little exposed despite being mostly invisible, Chiân tapped the lock with her wand.

“Alohomora,” she whispered, and heard it click open. Heart pounding with excitement she lifted the heavy iron bar across the doors and pushed them open. The space beyond was almost black, but in the shaft of light falling through the opened door she could see the ceiling curving down into a staircase.

Without thinking she stepped through the door.

Immediately there was an ear-splitting screeching sound like a thousand cats being trodden on at once. Chiân leapt backwards and ran. Ducking back down through one of the aisles Chiân put bookshelves between her and Timmins, who was running furiously towards the far doors. Chiân’s heart raced madly as she ran back to the common room, and did not remove the disillusionment charm until she was safely inside.

Pretoria blinked up at her. “Did you just apparate?”

“You can’t apparate in school, dipshit,” said a fourth year. Sam and Pretoria were hanging out on the beanbags with some of the others. Chiân was too exhilarated with her discovery to bother dragging them away, so she ended up telling all of them about the passageway she had just discovered.

Pretoria excitedly raised the unifying charm Sam had suggested on Christmas day, saying it was time to use it. She was thinking out loud about when they might be able to sneak into the library while the others around them debated the issue of the screeching alarm and what it might be.

Sam was looking apprehensive. “I’m not sure about doing it on a person, you know?” Sam had said of the unifying charm. “Like, even if it works, I dunno if I’m good enough at it and frankly I don’t want to do any more damage to your head.”

“What we need is a really over-achieving Ravenclaw,” said Pretoria. “Wait, isn’t Ellen doing Charms NEWT? We can ask her when she gets back.”

Chiân agreed that experimenting with a charm which may or may not even be appropriate for the task was not a good way to start.

She was then distracted by the arrival of Vessy, Lydia, Egan, Calix, and Kyril. They had just arrived back for term and still had snowflakes unmelted on their windswept faces. They all went down to dinner together later, swapping stories about the holidays and chattering keenly. Chiân found herself genuinely laughing for the first time since Christmas, grateful that her friends had returned.

During potions the next day Chiân had been sure to sit next to Asher, thanking him sardonically for the drawing he had given her. She did not mention that she kept it by her bed. As they got on with chopping tentacular roots, she asked him about the secret library of fires.

“Oh yeah, it’s definitely real,” he said in the kind of over-eager way which made Chiân feel like it probably wasn’t.

“Sure. But has anyone actually _seen_ it? Like, anyone you know personally?”

To her surprise, he nodded. “You know Ozzy and Mia and them? I think some of them snuck into the restricted section last year and found it.”

Chiân looked skeptical. “Ash, I’ve been in the restricted section. I’m asking if there are other parts of the library, further in or whatever.”

“You’ve been in the restricted Section?” He looked impressed. “Well, I dunno. If you like I could ask them?”

“I’ll ask them myself,” she said, grinning at him.

Vessy, Lydia, and Chiân had all received a Friday afternoon detention during the first week back for roller skating down the dungeon corridors, screaming and running into things. Professor Wexel had looked exasperated beyond words, muttering “stupid girls” and waving his wand to disentangle them from the suit of armour they had collided with. Perhaps he had been exasperated enough to not forsee that giving them each the same detention was a counter-productive move, but the only effect the detention had on Chiân was making her miss her first counselling session of the term. Otherwise cleaning a disused dungeon with two of her best friends had been quite an enjoyable way to spend a Friday afternoon.

They were just exciting the dungeon together, moaning about the slime and dirt now covering their robes, when Pretoria and Sam came rushing up to them.

“There you are!”

“We’ve been looking for you, Chiân.”

“We’ve found someone to do the charm-“

“This Ravenclaw chick. She’s used it a bunch-“

“She works in the sanctuary and uses it, like, regularly, to find bits of old reptile skin and stuff-“

“She reckons it will work on your brain-“

Lydia and Vessy were looking at her with twin confusion. Grinning widely, Chiân slipped her arms through theirs. “I gotta catch you guys up. Come on,” she gestured for Pretoria and Sam to join them. “Let’s go to the dorms.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> An audio recording of this chapter can be found here:
> 
> https://soundcloud.com/kristin-briggs/chapter-ten-icy-turns-audio-recording/s-1yPBAYH6u8u


	11. Some Helping Hands

“Hey, you must be Chiân. I’m Christine.” The Ravenclaw held out a hand with amusing formality and Chiân shook it.

Shanti was sat on a desk behind Christine and gave Chiân a wave when she came in. “Here for moral support,” she said.

“Or just because you’re nosy,” said Pretoria, making her way to another desk.

They were in an empty classroom on the Charms corridor. Pretoria and Sam and their friend Ellen had arranged to meet Christine after the deadline for a piece of her NEWT coursework. It was early February and Chiân had been getting impatient, but as Sam had kept reminding her they really didn’t want to take any chances with this, as there was a very real possibility that her head might explode.

By now Vessy and Lydia were fully in on Chiân’s half-formed plan to hunt down her memory. In fact somehow all the Slytherin first years knew, as well as some of the Gryffindors, and all of them wanted to be part of it. Chiân had headed off most of them from coming to the classroom with them that afternoon, but Egan, Asher, Tiffany, and Calix had been so annoying about it that Pretoria had suggested they stand watch at either end of the corridor to keep a look out for the Bruchs.

Vessy and Lydia were joining them in the classroom. They sat arm-in-arm, quieter than usual in the presence of so many older students. Chiân felt excited and relieved to finally be doing something about it all.

“Okay,” said Christine. “So, you want a unifying charm, but you want it on your mind, is that correct?”

“My memories, yeah.”

Christine was quite tall, with short, curly fair hair. She was chewing the inside of her cheek as she assessed Chiân.

“Okay, I think what we’re gonna do – I’m gonna extract one of your memories – like, an insignificant one – so that we can check if it’s worked. That okay?”

Chiân agreed. Christine muttered something and drew a simple clay bowl out of the air just the way Professor Petrarch had made a chair for her at Christmas. She put the bowl on the desk beside her.

“Okay, stay still,” she said to Chiân, leaning down. She placed her wandtip to Chiân’s temple, face serious, then slowly pulled out a shimmering silvery thread.

Vessy made a soft noise.

Christine stepped back, holding the wand aloft, memory fluttering slowly from the tip like an ethereal streamer. She placed it in the bowl, a modest smile of success.

She held out the bowl to show Chiân, who looked into it. It looked as though it was holding a small amount of glistening, thick mist.

“What memory did you take?”

Christine shrugged. “Just the top one, I think. It’s quite difficult to work out where you’re at in someone else’s memories.” Chiân looked down and saw that Christine’s face was swimming up through the mist. Chiân saw her lips move in the bowl. _‘Okay, stay still’._

“Right, now for the tricky part.” Chiân put the bowl down and Christine rolled up her sleeves. “I know in theory how this should work, but I think I’m gonna do a spell first that’ll make your mind sort of, er, visible.”

“What, ‘ _circum iaceri’_?” said Shanti, and the two Ravenclaws exchanged a grin.

“What is that?” said Lydia.

“It kind of projects what’s going on in your head into like, a bubble around you,” explained Christine. “We all got really good at countering it last year because people kept sneaking into each other’s dorms and performing it on people while they slept.”

“Everyone was spying on each other’s dreams. It was a nightmare,” Shanti added.

“It won’t hurt or anything. It’ll just make it easier to check if the charm’s done what we want it to, because we’ll be able to see it.” She raised her wand.

“Don’t think about dicks,” said Pretoria. Chiân could hear her grin without having to turn.

The room went quiet as Christine uttered the first spell. It was the strangest feeling, like a light-headedness but equally like having her head inflated to the size of a small moon. Vessy was not the only one to exclaim in awe this time.

Chiân‘s vision became obscured by a dancing network of zipping colours and vague shapes, all made up of a kind of finely constellated dust. It looked almost like some kind of outer-space nebula or something, Chiân thought. It all had its own light, strange and hypnotic. She could just about make out warped and momentary shapes she thought might resemble faces and people, but then Christine was raising her wand again, pointing it straight at her face.

Chiân felt a slightly ticklish warmth blow through her, and heard a loud “ha!”

“It’s worked!” Pretoria shouted triumphantly.

“Right, I’m gonna reverse the first charm,” Christine called to her, and a second later Chiân felt a slight compression, like the first pangs of a headache, and her vision cleared. The room clamoured with impressed voices.

“Look!”

“Oh my God, that’s cool.”

“Look at the bowl!” Lydia and Vessy were pointing excitedly. Blinking and still a little dazed, Chiân looked at the desk.

“Nice work,” Ellen said to her friend, and Christine smirked a little.

Chiân gaped. The contents of the bowl was now giving off a slightly pulsating, pale yellow glow. The same glow, in fact, which was coming from her hands.

“I’ve localised the light to your hands. Thought that was slightly more practical than having your entire face fluoresce,” Christine told her. Chiân lifted her hands to her face, mouth wide open in amazement.

“Holy shit,” she said.

“Brilliant!” Lydia came up next to her and stared at her hands as well.

They tried it out for a few minutes. Vessy and Lydia took turns standing on desks in opposite corners to Chiân so that she could walk towards them, observing how the glow intensified as she approached whoever was holding the bowl. They ran out into the corridor to try an even longer distance, and the other first years came over to admire Chiân’s hands.

Asher and Egan ran to one end of the corridor with the bowl and the memory as Chiân, Vessy and Lydia ran to the other. Chiân’s hands almost looked normal at this distance, but still slightly brighter than they should be in the dusky light of early evening. Once more approaching the memory her hands started to glow until she reached Asher and the bowl. Reaching out to take it the light in both was almost too bright to look at. Tiff clapped in excitement.

“Okay, pack it in dipshits,” called Pretoria. “You’re being far too obnoxious,” but she smiled at Chiân all the same.

Christine encouraged Chiân that putting the memory back in her head was really not that hard, and she was right. Chiân lifted it from the bowl with her wand, squinting against the brightness as she held it to her temple. As soon as it was back in her head the light in her hands died too.

“It’s still there though, right? The charm?” asked Vessy.

“Yep. Probably will be forever because I have no idea how to undo that,” said Christine frankly. “We mostly use it in the sanctuary to find shit that gets thrown out, so we never have to worry about it.”

“Can we go test it in the library?” said Lydia, excitedly, looking at the sixth years.

“Do what you want, I’m not your mum,” said Pretoria.

At the same time Sam said “no, we need to plan this properly,” and glared at her girlfriend while Ellen laughed. “Anyway the library’s gonna shut in half an hour.”

“I mean, if you want to worry about breaking school rules then you should probably, I don’t know, just listen to Petrarch,” said Shanti, who was not quite successful at keeping the snootiness out of her voice.

“What a very Ravenclaw thing to say,” said Chiân, grinning.

“Well, it’s no skin off my back if you get caught.” She smiled. “Hey, come and see Boba some time, yeah?”

“Yeah, definitely!”

The next step in the plan involved the Gryffindors.

Chiân had noticed in the past month that neither Ozzy nor Theo ever turned up to breakfast – even at weekends, though they might occasionally stumble in for lunch. It was proving very difficult to organically run into them and short of barraging back into Gryffindor tower Chiân wasn’t sure how to ask them about their explorations of the Hogwarts library.

Since having her hands charmed into tracking devices Chiân was very keen to push on with the other parts of the plan. The alarming number of people who were in on what was now commonly referred to as ‘the heist’ were also keen to be involved in the next steps. About five people had accompanied her to the library to test whether her hands glowed at all, and every single one of them had been promptly kicked out for shrieking excitedly when they had. Only faintly, to be sure, but it was definitely there.

This had made Chiân even more desperate to talk to Ozzy and Theo, so in her next potions lesson she brought it up with Asher. Asher had suggested that they wait for the fifth years after Quidditch practice on Friday afternoon, but Chiân had counselling that week.

Egan and Calix had been listening in. “Can’t you just go up to the common room? You’ve done it like a million times before, haven’t you?” said Calix.

“Oh shit, yeah you still have our Harry Potter statue,” said Asher laughing.

“Been meaning to return that,” Chiân said, wondering if the googley-eyes charm was permanent, and if not, how to make it so.

Vessy and Lydia were all too keen to accompany Chiân up to Gryffindor tower with the bust of Harry Potter, and Lydia had the bright idea to wait for another week until Professor Wexel gave them their roller-boots back. This was unusually restrained for Lydia – not a week before she had been suggesting to Chiân that she should get Mrs Pemberton to duel Professor Petrarch for her.

This had been after a counselling session in which Chiân had raised the same questions as she had on Christmas day. Mrs Pemberton had solemnly said that Chiân’s frustrations about being kept in the dark were completely justified, and that if she’d been in the same position she would have been furious. However, now that she was older and wiser she had to caution Chiân that the Headmaster was right, and the key now was focusing on her schoolwork and flourishing.

Chiân had interpreted this, along with the slightly facetious expression on her counselor's face, as code for ‘I can’t tell you to go against the headmaster, but let’s face it you’re not wrong’. Lydia had become quite taken with the idea of trying to get her in on ‘the heist’.

Chiân had argued that Mrs Pemberton’s real point was that she couldn’t undermine the headmaster and therefore telling her just how much shit they were getting up to was a very stupid idea indeed.

Lydia’s idea to take their roller-boots with them was a minor stroke of genius, though. Especially because they had run into Peeves on the second floor. He was thrilled to find an apparently invisible bust of Harry Potter floating down the corridor. Chiân had become quite the disillusionment aficionado and all three of them were blending in nicely, scooting along the stone corridors and snapping their wheels back into the soles if they had to climb stairs. Chiân was levitating the statue with her wand while the other two kept an eye out for Mr and Mrs Bruch. They were technically out before curfew, but only just, and they would certainly get into trouble for doing magic in the corridors, let alone doing magic on a historically significant statue they were absolutely not supposed to have.

Peeves had torn himself away from the painting of some cows he had been terrorizing and zoomed over to the statue.

“Shit,” seethed Chiân.

“It’s _Potty_. Hello Potty. Why so stony?” He cackled. “What are you doing floating around school, Potty? Is it _students?”_ He was talking incredibly loudly, floating around and around the bust gleefully trying to attract attention.

“I’m gonna hex him,” whispered Lydia, pulling out her wand.

“Oh I heard one of them!” Said Peeves. “It _is_ students!” He flipped over and screamed at a deafening volume, “STUDENTS DOING MAGIC! STUDENTS STEALING POOR POTTY’S STATUE-“

“Run!” shrieked Vessy.

“Don’t run, you moron, _skate,_ ” Lydia yelled back.

“Pull me!” Chiân stuck her wand through her ponytail and focused on the statue. Lydia and Vessy scrambled around to find her arms and all three of them started to skate.

“Peeves?” It was the voice of the formidable Mrs Bruch. “Who are you shouting at, Peeves?”

“Go! Go! Go!” Chiân said, clenching her stomach to keep the statue in the air.

Lydia and Vessy pulled Chiân along between them, Peeves’ yells drowning out their giggling. As they reached the end of the corridor they heard the boom of Mrs Bruch addressing him. It was a weird feeling for Chiân, soaring down the hallways, trying desperately not to drop a very heavy stone bust, pulled along by two mostly invisible friends.

They scrambled up staircases and pulled each other down corridors, the bobbing head of Harry Potter with googley-eyes turning every head of every portrait they passed.

They reached the corridor up to the Fat Lady and collapsed onto each other laughing.

“Who’s there?” she said. “What on earth-“ the bust clunked to the ground and Chiân shushed the girls. The Fat lady was staring at it, alarmed.

They stifled silent giggles and Chiân pulled her wand out of her hair. She raised the statue to float on eye level with the woman, then said in her best impression of a growling male voice, “Hinkypunk.” Asher had told them the password that morning.

The Fat Lady blinked, then frowned suspiciously around the statue. “Very well,” she said at last, and swung forward.

Chiân could feel Vessy doubled up with laughter on her right as they climbed through the portrait hole, Potter floating in front of them like a large, bizarre stone ghost.

There was laughter in the common room as people spotted them. Asher and Tiffany knew immediately that it was them and came rushing up to the statue, squinting at the shifting shapes and textures that was the three girls. Chiân tried for a moment to keep the statue in the air, but then spotted Ozzy and Theo, who were roaring with laughter, and gave up.

The bust clunked once more to the ground in the middle of the common room, and with a tap of her wand Chiân undid the disillusionment charms. There was applause and some waving to Chiân, though she spotted some of the older students looking exasperated to the point of annoyance that even more idiot Slytherin first years were turning up in their common room.

Vessy and Lydia were looking around. Chiân made a mental note to tease Vessy later about the slight look of snobbish disdain in her appraisal of the décor. Bell, Dory, and Cara, some of the Gryffindor first years, came over to say hi. While they giggled to each other Chiân caught Asher’s eye. They left the girls and went to find Ozzy and Theo.

“Yeah, we tried to find the stupid secret library of fire,” said Theo when they’d finally broached the subject.

“Got a month of detentions for that one,” said Ozzy, grinning impishly. He had been extremely pleased with the googley-eyed Harry Potter and kept looking at it like it was a bad drawing he’d been given by a child.

“How far did you get?” said Chiân eagerly. “Did you make it to the doors at the end of the restricted section?”

“Yep. Set off the fucking caterwauling charm as well”

“Is that the shrieking noise?” said Chiân, understanding.

“The what?” asked Tiffany, who had joined them.

“It’s like an alarm spell. Makes the ground scream at anyone who isn’t supposed to step on it,” explained Becky, who was listening in from an adjacent armchair.

Ozzy grinned at Chiân. “Been doing some exploring?”

“Yeah, and we’ve got some more to do.” Chiân hadn’t intended to tell Ozzy and Theo about the heist, but she liked them. She had learnt this far into the year that not every Gryffindor was so quick to befriend a Slytherin – even a first year – and that this coldness went both ways. She was keen to show that this wasn’t happening with her, though, and found herself telling them and an eagerly listening Becky all about the plan.

“And it’s definitely down there. I went into the restricted Section the other night to check and I put my hands right up against the door. It was the brightest they’ve ever been. Except, y’know, when we were testing it.”

“You went back without us?” said Vessy, pouting slightly. She and Lydia has re-joined the circle.

Chiân rolled her eyes. “I can’t do everything with an entourage of twenty students, Vess.”

“But we’re coming with you when you actually go looking for it, right?” said Lydia, looking ready to be offended.

“I want to come as well!” said Tiffany.

“Guys,” Becky interrupted the clamouring first years. “You’re not talking about a goddamn Hogsmeade trip, here.” She looked at Chiân. “There’s some dangerous shit down there, and without trying to sound like one of you, I think you should probably take us with you,” she gestured to herself, Ozzy, and Theo.

Theo frowned at her. “What do you mean ‘there’s some dangerous shit’ – wait, have you been down that stairwell?”

Becky grinned.

“You have never,” said Ozzy, twisting in his seat to gape at her. “Rebecca Stormwright, I’m amazed at you.”

“How did you get past the caterwauling charm?” said Theo, bewildered.

Becky gave him a disdainful look. “You know you only set that off by actually touching the ground, right? We flew.”

Chiân’s face lit up.

“Who’s ‘we’?” demanded Oz.

“Me, Hannah, and Mia. Thought we’d give it a go after you guys told us about getting caught halfway down.”

“I cannot believe you never told us this.” Theo sounded grumpy.

“What’s down there, then?” demanded Ozzy.

She shrugged. “We didn’t go enormously far, but there were a few corridors at least of labelled rooms. Stuff like ‘’Rune Tablet archives’ and ‘Cursed contraband’, that type of thing. Just a massive storage dump, essentially.”

“So there might actually be an archive of fire?” said Asher excitedly.

The others argued enthusiastically about the possibilities but Chiân kept quiet. She was thinking about her brother. It was all very well sneaking into common rooms and speculating about Hogwarts legends, but at the heart of the ‘heist’ was the very frightening question of the memory they were hunting.

Chiân had agreed with Becky’s point that this was no group day out they were planning, but she wondered if anyone else was appreciating the seriousness of it. Ultimately what they were really trying to uncover was whether or not Tian was dead.

She didn’t mention this to either Vessy or Lydia over the next week, but did bring it up to both Pretoria and Sam when she got the chance to fill them in on what Becky had said.

“You don’t have to do this you know, Chiân,” said Sam earnestly. “You could just write to your dad and ask him.”

“No,” said Chiân, firmly. She had thought about this a lot, and had even sat down to try to write a letter asking all the questions she wanted to ask. Every time she did though the hole in her head started to hurt with alarming intensity and her mother’s voice sobbing the word ‘ _’monster’_ had echoed around the empty space in her memory.

She pointed out that even if she did write a letter honestly asking about her brother, the answers might be exactly the kind of thing which Mrs Pemberton had called ‘scratching the wound’, and nobody seemed to know what led down that path.

Both of them had agreed at that, and they had begun to think seriously about who might be the best to take in the group. Pretoria had excitedly started discussing which Slytherins were the best at spellwork and curse breaking, etc., but Sam had shut her up by pointing out that it was Chiân’s thing and really it was up to her.

Chiân considered this carefully all week, so distracted in lessons that she got her lowest ever mark in a potions practical. She would look around at dinner times in the Great Hall and try to picture who might be the least embarrassing to have a good cry in front of, should the memory turn out to be something really horrible. Part of her knew that it was more likely to trigger some kind of surge of violent magic, and in the end she settled on the people she knew could look after themselves.

“Hey Oz, Becky, meet me in the sanctuary at one, yeah? By the niffler compound,” Chiân said, leaning over the Gryffindor table at lunch that Saturday.

“Sure thing, broomstick girl.” Oz winked at her.

“Is this about the Heist?” said another girl who might have been Hannah.

Chiân was a little taken aback. “Uh, yeah. I’m putting a team together.”

“Good luck!” said possibly Hannah.

“Ooh, have we been shortlisted?” said Becky.

“Yeah. Bring Theo?”

They had nodded and assured her they’d be there. Chiân grinned at them and hurried off to look for Asher.

She had had a row that morning with Vessy and Lydia, trying to break it to them gently that she didn’t think they should come.

Vessy had actually cried, but in a selfish way that had pissed Chiân off royally. She had retaliated by saying some rather rude things about Vessy being a spoilt pure-blood brat and Lydia had yelled that they hadn’t wanted to come in the first place and that Chiân could sleep in the fish tank from now on. Chiân felt bad about the whole thing, but was relieved now that they were definitely not coming.

The niffler compound was a delightful part of the Rubeus House and Gardens. It was always noisy – either with students giggling over the nifflers or staff screeching at them for stealing their shirt buttons.

It was also right next to an enormous, many-leveled fountain full of many-headed fish, which made it impossible to accidentally overhear any conversations.

At one o’clock Chiân was sat on the bench by the fountain with Asher. He pointed out Pretoria and Sam crossing the compound and they joked that it would be at least another fifteen minutes before any of the Gryffindor fifth years showed up.

Then he looked at Chiân. “Can I ask you a question?”

“No,” she said, smiling.

“Why am I the only first year you’re bringing with you?” He looked quite serious for a moment.

Chiân thought about making a dumb joke, but met his eyes and felt herself sigh. She decided to be honest for once. “Because you were the only one who wasn’t scared of me after I blew up a broomstick.”

She didn’t have time to see Asher’s reaction because just then the girls reached them. It was only five minutes until Becky showed up, apologising and flopping down onto the ground in front of the bench, but it was at least fifteen before they spotted Ozzy and Theo, ambling along with twin grins on their faces.

“Right. Welcome,” said Chiân to the six of them. She smiled a little sheepishly. “It feels like I’m holding a meeting.”

“I mean, you sort of are,” said Theo.

“I suppose. Well, in that case, I would like to open this meeting by formally inviting you to join me on my, uh, grand day out.”

“That’s a much better name than ‘the heist,” said Becky.

“Oi,” said Pretoria. “I came up with ‘the heist’.”

“Alright, keep your pants on, Clarke.”

Chiân raised an eyebrow. “Are you guys gonna kill each other? Or be adults?”

Ozzy laughed. “Rich coming from an eleven year old.”

Sam spoke over him. “To be fair this is probably the first time in like a century that Slytherin and Gryffindor have done anything together.”

“That’s not true – sometimes we play Quidditch,” jested Theo.

“Yeah, and we kick your ass every time,” Ozzy said.

“Ziento, I will hex you,” said Pretoria, pulling out her wand.

“Oh try me, Clarke,” he shot back, but they were both grinning.

Becky and Sam were both practically minded, and managed to marshal the others into arranging a time and place for them all to meet. Sam had been all for waiting until the end of term, which was about a month away. Chiân had felt slightly sick at the thought of waiting that long. Thankfully Ozzy’s overwhelming drive to get into enormous amounts of trouble for incredibly stupid reasons was on her side. They eventually agreed on next Friday, because some of the teachers were in the habit of heading to the village pub after lessons ended for the week, and more often than not this included the headmaster.

Pretoria had also protested that seven was way too many people, but Chiân reminded her that she had had no qualms about being part of a group of six when sneaking up to the kitchens in libation week.

“Yeah, but this is different. You’re not supposed to go into the kitchens but it’s not dangerous. We have no idea what we’re gonna find in the library and we will definitely, definitely be out of bounds. Big difference between doing something against the rules and something like, lowkey illegal. The more of us there are the more likely we’re gonna get caught.”

Chiân took a deep breath. “I’ve thought it through, Pretoria, okay?”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. At least three of you are really good flyers, so if something happens and I… explode… there are enough of you that someone should be able to go get help even if most of you are, like, concussed.” She had been going to say ‘dying’, but thought that might sound too dramatic. Pretoria grunted.

Asher spoke up. “Plus, you guys know way more magic than us, and it’s sounding like we’re gonna need that.”

“Yeah, why are we bringing a first year along again?” said Sam.

“Because he is my friend,” Chiân said, and something in her tone closed the topic firmly.

Before heading back up to the castle Chiân decided to drop in on Boba. Shanti wasn’t there but the demiguise knew her by now, as did many of the staff. Boba dropped out of a tree right in front of her when she walked into the shelter. He looked pleased to see her and Chiân spent a peaceful hour sat underneath one of the indoor trees, gently stroking his astonishingly soft silvery hair. The way it floated and gleamed reminded her a little bit of memories, pulled from heads.

“I’m going on an adventure on Friday,” she murmured to Boba. The others had all gone up to the castle, though Asher had offered to stay with her for company if she wanted it. She’d told him to head on up. It was nice to sit and think. “I’m gonna go find a piece of my head. It got stolen. Well, just removed. They were trying to help me, but now they won’t give it back.”

She was absently telling Boba about the plan when she suddenly noticed that his eyes had flashed electric blue and seemed even more prominent than usual.

“You alright there, buddy?” she said, startled.

The demiguise made an odd movement with his head, almost like he was listening for something. His eyes flashed bright blue again, this time for longer. He made a tiny noise and rippled into invisibility. She felt him leap from her lap, surprised and a little sorry to see – or rather feel – him go.

Chiân waited to see if he was going to reappear, but gave up after a few minutes. Sighing, she got to her feet to head back to the Slytherin common room. She had to think of a way to make it up to Vessy and Lydia so that they didn’t tie her up and dump her in the aquarium in the middle of the night or something.

She did not hear the soft pattering of little footsteps which followed her up into the school.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> An audio recording of this chapter can be found here:
> 
> https://soundcloud.com/kristin-briggs/chapter-eleven-some-helping-hands-audio-recording/s-qTW03PxuagM


	12. Lead the Way, Firebug

The first Friday of March had arrived.

Chiân had made it up with Vessy and Lydia by taking them to kitchens for cake several days before. Mollified and in the end resigned that she wasn’t going to change her mind, the two of them sat with her in the library until Timmins came around to usher everyone out for the evening.

Lydia hugged her quickly. “Good luck,” she whispered.

“We’ll be waiting up for you!” Vessy said, throwing her arms around her.

“Thanks, guys.” Chiân slipped behind a bookcase as they left the library. She whispered the incantation and tapped herself on the head. She glanced down in time to see her clothes undulate into the faded colour of books.

The others weren’t going to be there until eleven o’clock, but Chiân had been so tightly wound all day that she had decided to wait in the library. It wasn’t like she wouldn’t have anything to pass the time.

She waited very still in the shadows as Timmins did the rounds, extinguishing lamps with his wand and checking all the nooks and crannies for lingering students. She heard the creak of the doors and the click of the locks as he left for the evening.

She let out a long breath.

“Lumos”, she muttered, and set off for the restricted section. She knew this part of the library reasonably well by now, and had also learnt to turn off the lamps with a simple ‘knox’, feeling safer in the warm, dusty darkness.

She’d had a few run-ins with books which yelled and cursed at her when she opened them, and carefully avoided all the ones with magical booby traps as she selected one to read.

A book titled ‘ _Dark Adjacency: flight for the fiend’_ caught her eye. She eased it down from the high shelf, shook it carefully to see if it complained, then settled herself on the floor.

She flicked through it and spotted a diagram detailing the systems of enchantment used in broomstick making. The book was detailing the information with a view towards teaching the reader to effectively curse the broomstick, or alternately to replicate the complicated flying bewitchment upon an item of their choice. Thinking of her own exploits with broomsticks Chiân bent to read, wandtip low over the paper.

_“The handle of the broomsticke must be constructed from a woode possessing the qualities of quasi-sentience, whiche is any magical tree displaying autonomy or Will during life and includes moste Wand trees. It is this qualite whiche allows the craftsman to instill in the woode a nexus of magicks by whiche the woode may recognise and accommodate the Will of its rider.”_

A lamp flickered on in the next aisle over. Chiân froze, listening. After about ten minutes it flickered off again. Uneasy, she went back to reading.

“ _The woode must be enchanted such that it does retain its nascent capacite for movement withoute retaining its will. This gutting of the autonomy from the magical force contains similar principles of magic as are found in such spells of domination as the Imperious Curse. It is not enough to use a simple levitation charm: the broomsticke is a cruxe wherein the axis of true living qualite meets the axis of external imposition of magical control. If this adjacency can be manipulated-“_

The lights above Chiân flared. She scrambled to her feet, heart thumping. She couldn’t see anyone in the aisle – but then she could barely see herself.

“Hello?” she whispered. And then, because it would be just like him to make her jump out of her skin, she said “Ozzy?”

There was a small noise, almost like a chirp, and Boba shimmered into visibility.

“Boba!” Chiân gasped and knelt down, removing her own, less effective invisibility. “What are you doing here? How did you get into the castle, little guy?”

He meeped at her. He was holding something in his long fingers.

“What’s this? Have you brought me a present?” She stared at it. It looked like an oversized purple walnut. “What is this?” She took it from him carefully. He seemed pleased. “Thanks, Boba. Can’t believe you, cheeky thing. Sneaking around the library,” she smiled at him. To her delight, he gave a happy burble back and clambered into her arms.

Chiân stroked his head absently and examined the nut. Having nothing better to do for the next two and a half hours in a deserted library, Chiân headed with Boba back to the main section to read up about strange purple nuts.

She did not have much success, though she was learning a great deal. Getting bored of looking for the name of the nut she strayed into the Bestiary section, leaving Boba to play happily with a spider he had found.

“Let’s read about you, shall we, Boba? Here we are,” she opened an enormous and very dusty book about Far Eastern magical creatures and leafed through it until she found the chapter on demiguises. “Look, a whole chapter about you! Ooh, there’s a picture,” she pointed at the drawing and Boba crept around to stare at it. “Not as cute as you, obviously.”

She read the chapter out loud to him quietly. He seemed to be enjoying himself. Then she turned a page and saw a large illustration of a pair of eyes. They were bright electric blue.

“Hmm, maybe this will tell us why your eyes were doing this the other day. Let’s see…” She read aloud:

“ _Perhaps even more remarkable than their talent for invisibility is the demiguise’s ability to see into the future. Their talent for anticipating and reacting to nearing events is a crucial protective feature of the demiguise as it makes them extremely difficult to capture. This is one of the reasons their hair has remained so valuable across the ages. It has remained very difficult to get hold of despite the demiguise suffering no scarcity in population compared to many other magical species.”_

Chiân stared at this. Then looked at Boba. Then back at the book. It went on to describe how its eyes flashed blue when looking into different moments in time. It also said that the best way to catch a demiguise was to gain its trust, as they became almost maternally loyal to any creature with whom they shared a bond.

“You can see into the future?” said Chiân, giving him a scratch that made him wiggle his head contentedly. He opened his eyes and looked up at her, then reached out and very deliberately tapped the nut, which was lying on the table between them.

“You can see into the future… and you bought me a nut…” Chiân said. “Okay, well, it must be important then. Let’s make sure I take it with me!”

Abruptly Boba cocked his head towards the library doors. Chiân saw his eyes flash blue, and then he disappeared. She was about to call for him when she felt his little firm hands on her arm. Invisible he clambered up her arms and hid himself around her neck, under her hair like a very silky, bony feather boa.

“Alright little guy, you’re safe there, don’t worry.” Chiân found his head and gave it a scratch. She extinguished her wand and carefully closed the book. A moment later the door creaked open.

“Chiân?” said Pretoria softly, voice carrying in the darkness.

“She’s over there.” Sam waved to her and Chiân stood up to greet them, putting the purple nut into her pocket.

Asher and Becky arrived a few minutes later, but they had to wait another half an hour for Ozzy and Theo. Ozzy had fallen asleep and still had red lines across the left side of face.

Ozzy, Pretoria, Sam, and Asher had all brought broomsticks, as agreed.

“Right. Shall we do this, then?” said Pretoria.

Wands out, they made their way through the restricted section. As they walked Chiân watched her hands. The glow, which had been barely discernible in the day, became more pronounced as they approached the far door. It was still faint, but certain.

Pretoria unlocked the doors with her wand, and she and Becky pulled them wide.

They all stood there for a moment. The passage and staircase beyond were pitch black.

Chiân raised her hands in front of her, as if reaching out for something. Her hands glowed a little brighter. Something itched in her head, like the name of a familiar song, just out of reach. A hand, outstretched…

As if sensing the tension in her shoulders Boba nuzzled her ear slightly, still huddled around her neck. Chiân thought for a second about trying to leave him behind, but had a suspicion that he had a better idea of what he was doing that any of them did.

Even Ozzy and Theo seemed serious as they mounted their broomsticks. Theo got on behind Ozzy and wrapped his arms around his waist. Asher and Chiân got on in front of Sam and Pretoria respectively, and Becky took Asher’s broom.

With a solemn nod from Pretoria, they all rose into the air. Each passenger lit their wand and held it aloft, and they slowly flew a few feet into the passage, Pretoria and Chiân in the front. It seemed Becky had been right about the Caterwauling charm being set off by contact as no screeching sound erupted this time.

Chiân heard Becky say “ _fermoportus_ ” and the door swung closed behind them. Pretoria bent forwards around Chiân and, lying as flat as they could with two of them to a broom, began to follow the staircase downwards.

It was like a very odd, poorly lit rollercoaster, thought Chiân. She could hear Ozzy and Theo whooping a little as they flew down behind them. Becky had told them what she could remember of the turns and landing passages so that they wouldn’t be taken by surprise and run into an unexpected ceiling, but Chiân still thought they were probably going too fast. She trusted Pretoria, though and found herself laughing into the chill air as it rushed past her face.

It was with a sense of triumph and great satisfaction that she watched her hands grow brighter the further down they went. A few minutes of flying and they swooped into a spacious hallway. Chiân’s hands were bright enough here that she extinguished the light from her wand.

“Wait,” called Sam as they made to touch down. “Becky, is this part alarmed too?”

“Shouldn’t be,” she said, but didn’t sound sure.

Before any of them could object Ozzy bucked his broomstick and Theo, swearing loudly, tumbled off the back. He landed on the floor in a heap but no screeching greeted him. They all laughed in relief, dismounting too.

“Alright,” said Ozzy, ducking as Theo tried to smack him around the head. “Lead the way, Firebug.”

Chiân grinned at the aptness of this new nickname, then found herself glancing around for Asher, who came and stood beside her. Something about having a fellow first beside her year made her braver, even if he didn’t look nearly as nervous as she felt.

Chiân did a short walk around the hallway they found themselves in, her hands not quite managing to penetrate the black corridors that branched from it.

“We must be at least at the same level as the dungeons,” said Asher, looking around them.

“At least, yeah. Judging by temperature as much as distance,” said Sam. They could see their breath in the gloom.

“I think this way,” said Chiân, who was standing in the mouth of one of the passageways. Her hands seemed to pulse a little brighter here than any of the others.

They followed her down the corridor, raising their wands to catch the plaques on each door they passed.

Ozzy and Theo read them out as they went.

“Archive: Transfiguration NEWT papers, written theory.”

“I would rather be eaten by a hippogriff than take Transfiguration NEWT.”

“’Archive: Care of Magical Creatures NEWT, incident reports, fatal and/or/permanent’ – Jesus.”

“And apparently I _will_ get eaten by a hippogriff if I take that NEWT.”

“I wonder what they think fatal but not permanent looks like?”

Chiân led them down a left, gaining confidence with each step as the glow in her hands brightened.

Becky had been right to call this place a storage dump. It looked thoroughly unexciting, and after ten minutes of walking even the thrill of being out of bounds in the middle of the night started to wear off with the monotony of stone doorways, empty cardboard boxes in stacks, dust, and dull plaques about old exam papers. There were no portraits or tapestries down here, nor windows or anything else which made it feel less like a disappointingly mundane basement.

If it hadn’t been for the pale golden light of Chiân’s hands she might have dismissed this place just for being boring.

She felt Boba shift a little, as if he too was peering around at the doors. “Hey, little guy,” she said softly, scratching his head with her fluorescing hands.

“Uh… hey?” said Asher beside her.

Chiân laughed. “I wasn’t talking to you.”

“Well that’s not comforting,” he replied. “Did you see somethi-“

Boba made a small chirp and Asher whipped his head around, cricking his neck. His squinted into the gloom, trying to see what had made the noise.

Chiân ignored him. A few minutes later, though, she stopped and frowned at her hands. She turned around and walked back the way they came. She felt Boba move to sit on her shoulder, as if affirming her.

“Do you think we passed it?” asked Sam.

“What were some of the names we walked past?” Chiân asked the boys. She had been tuning out their constant, soft chatter and now regretted it.

“Uh,” said Ozzy helpfully.

“A bunch of artifact rooms,” Theo listed, “old equipment stuff for herbology, um, some exam records, and like a gate thing that said something about vaults.”

Chiân knew instinctively that this would be it, and sure enough her hands glowed their brightest yet as they found the gate. The plaque above it read ‘ _Vaults: Curio, Periculi,”_

“Clever boy,” said Chiân to Boba, who had evidently been trying to tell her she had walked past it.

“Why thank you,” said Ozzy.

“Who are you talking to?” said Asher suspiciously.

Chiân grinned. “My friend Boba. How do we get through this gate?”

“Firebug done lost her mind,” Ozzy said cheerily as Sam stepped forward and tapped the lock.

“Alohomora.” The lock rattled but did not open.

“Hmm,” said Sam.

“Try the reducto hex,” suggested Theo.

“No, wait,” said Becky. “If alohomora doesn’t work then it’s clearly locked with an enchantment. Reducto might just bounce off it and take off one of our heads or something.”

Theo grunted. They all thought for a moment, looking at the gate.

Chiân was examining the stone archway around the bars. “Do you think the enchantment includes the doorway? Or just the lock?”

Pretoria grinned. “Let’s find out.” They all stood back and Pretoria aimed her wand at the stone wall beside the gate. “Reducto!” A large portion of the wall crumbled into dust, freeing the hinges of the gate. Several of them whooped appreciatively. There was enough of a hole that they could all squeeze past the gate, passing the broomsticks to each other through the bars.

Chiân’s hands led them down a short flight of stairs and onto a small landing. There were two doors, both heavy and made of dark, stained wood. One was labelled “ _Vault: Edictum Conficiens_ ”. The other one “ _Vault: Curiae, Ignes, Maledictae_ , _etc.”_

Ozzy read them out, blankly.

Sam translated the second one. “Vault: Curiosities, Fires, and Curses.”

There was a sizzling moment of silence.

“Oh my god, the secret library of fires,” said Asher. “We found it.”

Chiân was comparing the brightness of her hands to each door. A minute degree of glowing told her what she instinctively knew. She stood before the Secret Library of Fires. “It’s this one.”

“Is it locked?” said Pretoria.

Chiân tried the handle.

It was not. The door swung wide.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> An audio recording of this chapter can be found here:
> 
> https://soundcloud.com/kristin-briggs/chapter-twelve-lead-the-way-firebug-audio-recording/s-8TlwA4zVI3w


	13. The Music of the Spheres

The vault room itself was unexceptional. It looked just like one of the dungeons Chiân had had to clean in detention with Vessy and Lydia.

The contents of the room, however, made the group of students slow to a stunned halt, turning around and around with open mouths.

“Holy shit,” said Ozzy.

In a wide circle around the hall were evenly spaced stone plinths. Around two thirds of the plinths were occupied by huge, gently pulsating, translucent spheres. Each one could have held several students, but instead seemed to hold explosions of magic, frozen in time. The orbs were clearly protective enchantments, keeping their contents safely contained.

Some of them held violent spheres of deep red and orange flame. Shapes, the faces of serpents and snarling wolves, dragon-heads and fangs ripped in and out of the roiling, seething mass almost fast enough to make the students wonder if they had really seen them there at all.

One of the orbs was filled with something jagged and sickly green, like a nest of frozen lightning bolts, slowly turning in an absent way within its confines. It stillness was eerie beside the frenetic gnawing aggression of the fires.

Still another contained a dense mass of shapes which made Chiân’s head hurt to look at. It was like a mirror caught in its moment of shattering, breaking outwards continually and falling back into itself like a collapsing star, twirling and snatching at the light. The shards of reflective silver felt wrong and unsettling, flashing glimpses of the room around them but distorting them into something sinister.

One orb contained a single, very normal looking egg. As Chiân wandered past it she noticed that the egg had a single hairline crack in it, running from top to bottom as if caught on the verge of hatching. Somehow this was among the more disturbing of the artefacts in the hall, and that included an orb which contained nothing but a large jumble of bones, topped with a monstrous, fanged snake skull that was bigger than Chiân.

They had all spread out, walking around them at a cautious distance, murmuring to each other and pointing.

Sam was stood in front of one of the balls of fire, a strange expression on her face. Chiân watched her from across the room. The fire was raining heavy redish light upon her scarred face. She looked impossibly old.

Pretoria came up to her and took her hand, looking into her face. Only at her gentleness in wiping Sam’s face did Chiân realise that Sam was crying. They spotted Chiân watching them. Sam smiled and wiped her nose on her sleeve self-consciously.

“It’s alright,” she said, beckoning Chiân over.

“Are you okay?”

“It’s Fiendfyre,” said Pretoria, a heavy hatred in her voice.

“It’s what?” Chiân looked at the ball of flame and monsters.

“Cursed fire. It’s devastatingly powerful. And also why I look like this,” Sam waved at her face. Chiân looked at her, unsure what to say. “Burns can be dealt with by pretty straightforward potions or healing charms. But not these burns. You can only manage the pain.”

Pretoria turned away like she couldn’t bear to listen to it.

“It’s nearly impossible to destroy, Fiendfyre. There’s only one spell that can counter it. I guess this is the best way to contain it if you don’t know how.” Sam smiled sadly with only half her face.

Just then there was a shriek followed by a loud _thunk_. They spun around. Ozzy had tried to touch one of the spheres and was now lying on the ground, completely rigid, a slightly ridiculous expression of surprise on his frozen face. Theo was next to him, scrambling down to check and see if his best friend was breathing.

The rest of them hurried over.

“You _imbecile,”_ Theo yelled after he found a pulse. He shook Ozzy’s shoulders worriedly. He seemed unable to move anything but his eyes.

“What’s happened to him?” said Asher, looking panicked.

Becky seemed unperturbed. “I mean, it looks like it’s just the body bind curse?”

“He’s been cursed?” Asher squeaked.

“Theo get out of the way,” said Becky, and with a zip of her wand Ozzy’s body relaxed.

He coughed. “Ow,”

Theo carried on yelling. “What did you touch it for, you absolute fuckwit-“

“Sam, Chiân, come here,” said Pretoria. She was standing very close to the bubble Ozzy had touched.

Chiân hurried over to them.

“He’s popped something.”

“You mean it’s gonna escape?” Sam looked deeply alarmed. This orb contained a mass of bubbling purple liquid that looked hideously acidic.

“No,” Pretoria was frowning. “I think there are a bunch of layers, like multiple enchantments protecting the bubble itself. I figured there must be, because I think that is literally just a sealant charm-“ she indicated the milky surface of the spheres themselves “-which is no protection at all. Hang on, let me try something.” Pretoria moved around the orb and muttered something, drawing her wand through the air.

Her wand left a golden-orange streak of light, which floated towards the bubble. It flashed brightly a good hand’s width away from the surface of the actual orb, then again, and again, and again, until it touched the orb itself. The brightness dropped into the surface and shivered over it like a ripple in water, dissipating after a moment.

“That’s a useful little trick,” said Becky.

“Thanks. Tells you if there’s magic binding something. Used to use it to work out which cupboards the exam papers were in.” Pretoria flashed a grin.

“Wait, your OWL papers?” said Ozzy, who was still on the floor, massaging the back of his head. “Are you telling me you cheated on your OWLs? Theo, how come we didn’t think of that?”

“Well there’s still time,” said Theo, helping him up with an impish grin.

“Was anybody counting how many layers of spellwork that was?” said Becky, ignoring the boys.

“Six,” said Asher and Sam together.

“And Ziento popped one of them already, so that’s seven. Seven curses around each bubble.”

“All of them?” asked Asher. They looked around at the spheres, hanging serenely around the chamber.

“If all the enchantments are as mild as petrificus totalus then that’s easy, we just take it in turns to fall over,” said Ozzy brightly.

“Don’t be thick, Ziento. Making the outermost layer of protection a pretty basic one makes sense – you’ve just dealt with any idiot student who’s down here on a dare or something.” Pretoria was looking around at the other orbs. “I bet you the enchantments get more severe the closer you actually get.”

“Well, there must be a way to find out.”

“Hey, does that charm you just used tell you what the enchantment is?”

“Nope. Just detects it. I think there is a charm for identifying enchantments though, hrmm.”

“Don’t suppose any of you guys know it?”

“I wish I’d thought-“

“Chiân?” said Sam.

They all fell silent, looking around for her.

Chiân was at the other side of the hall. She had spotted an orb that was slightly smaller than most of the others. Within it was a shifting tangle of dark dust, chasing a thin strand of silver-white memory, expanding and contracting, sometimes angry, sometimes afraid.

As Chiân walked towards it she watched as the mass within started to glow gold. She lifted her hands – not to touch it but to compare the brightness of her hands. They were almost too bright to look at.

Boba had jumped down from her shoulder as she approached the bubble, but Chiân didn’t have any space in her brain to worry about him.

She stared into the sphere, its many concentric surfaces rippling gently.

“That’s me,” she whispered.

The strand of thought was twisting around, writhing like an animal in pain through the swarm of dark flecks. It was glowing with the same pale light as her hands but was still unmistakeably a memory.

Chiân felt the others approach and stand around her, looking into the sphere.

Pretoria performed her detection charm again and they all silently counted the flashes before it reached the orb itself.

“Seven,” she said quietly.

“What now?” said Sam.

There was a minute of silence. Chiân would always look back on that minute with pride and gratitude – not one of them suggested abandoning it and heading back up to the library.

Chiân came back to her senses and turned to face them. “There must be a way to lift the curses. Petrarch isn’t coming down here and getting cursed seven times before he can examine these things.”

“Yeah, but we don’t know what the curses are. Kinda hard to counter an unknown curse,” said Becky.

“Might not be,” said Sam, looking thoughtfully at the orb. “I mean, this might be a ridiculously dangerous idea but, well… we’ll know exactly what the curses are once they’ve hit us.”

Theo chuckled, then looked at them. “Wait, you’re serious.”

“She’s got a point,” said Becky.

Ozzy nudged Theo. “I mean, worked for me, didn’t it?”

Theo rolled his eyes at his friend.

“Wait, what if we trying breaking the layers with something else?” said Asher.

“That’s never going to work,” said Becky. Ozzy had already pulled off one of his shoes and before anyone could protest he had chucked it at the sphere. It ricocheted off and he and Becky had to duck to avoid being hit in the face. Theo tried to smack him again.

Pretoria tried her charm once more. There were still seven layers.

“Well, it was a nice idea,” said Sam as Ozzy put his shoe back on.

“People it is,” he said cheerily, hopping slightly.

Chiân was frowning. “I feel like this is possibly the worst idea in the history of bad ideas,” she admitted after a moment. “What, we’re just gonna take it in turns to slap a layer of bubble and hope for the best?”

She looked up and was surprised to see that all of them were grinning at each other.

“Good thing you didn’t bring any Hufflepuffs, Firebug,” said Ozzy and they all laughed.

“Should be fun,” said Becky, winking at her.

“Besides, we know a tonne of counter-curses.” Pretoria looked so unperturbed it was in itself perturbing.

“And how bad can they be, right? We’re still in school. It’s not like they want anyone to die,” said Theo.

“Though it is worth pointing out that one of the things being guarded in here is possibly the most lethal substance wizards ever fucked around and invented,” said Sam, nodding at the several bubbles of Fiendfyre. “But what the hell, let’s give it a shot.”

“Guys,” Chiân hesitated.

“Ah, shut up Firebug. It’s not all about you,” Ozzy said. “This is the most fun I’ve had all year.”

“I was just going to say that you’re all colossal idiots, and I’m very grateful for you,” Chiân smiled at him. “Okay then. Let’s do this.”

Becky insisted that Asher go first because they already knew they could reverse that one. He stepped up to the plinth looking determined, and reached out a hand. There was a noise like a large elastic band snapping and he fell rigidly backwards. Theo and Ozzy caught him, and Becky revived him in seconds.

“Easy,” Pretoria grinned. “Anyone feel like going next?”

Theo stepped forward, a slightly tense look on his face.

“Everyone ready,” said Pretoria. They all had their wands out.

Something in Chiân’s head was saying “ _this is stupid this is stupid this is stupid”_ over and over again. ‘Theo is a prefect’, she reminded herself with gritted teeth. ‘And Pretoria and Sam are sixth years. They are all perfectly capable of making their own choices.’

Theo reached up towards the orb, touching the second invisible layer of enchantment. The noise was louder this time, and Theo immediately staggered backwards, yelling in pain and clutching his hand.

The orb rippled angrily and thick, foul-smelling boils seemed to envelop it for a moment, hiding the memory within it.

“Show me your hand!” Sam was shouting, tugging at Theo’s arm. Pretoria and Ozzy held him down as he shrieked. Pretoria pulled his arm out and Sam’s face settled into a look of easy concentration. She was muttering and running her wand over his skin, which was covered in the same throbbing green pustules as the orb.

His yelling calmed into gasps, which became hiccups. He stared at his hand. Already the boils were receding slightly, the skin an angry red where they had been.

Chiân looked back at the orb. There, too, the oily, agitated surface was fading away, the boils bursting into nothingness and leaving an ever-so-slightly clearer bubble beneath it.

“Fuck me,” breathed Ozzy, sitting back.

“Thanks, Sam. What _was_ that?” Theo sat up, rubbing his hand gingerly.

“Well, I think it was Doxy venom. At least, looked like it. But you know if you do it fast enough you can just draw most poisons back out of the skin pretty easily. Has to be immediate, though.”

“If that’s the second layer I hate to think what’s coming next,” said Theo. They all looked back at the orb.

Chiân’s stomach was clenched. She wished Boba was still tucked beneath her ponytail. His warmth and weight had been comforting. She thought for a second about calling the whole thing off. It was horrible to watch her friends line up like this.

“I’ll go next,” said Becky without a trace of fear in her voice. At just that second Chiân noticed a movement – something was shuffling along in the shadows, just out of reach of the weird light cast by the spheres.

They had left their broomsticks on the floor near the door, but when Chiân squinted towards where they should’ve been she couldn’t see them. She looked back towards the motion that had caught her eye, and as if he could feel her squinting at him, Boba materialised. His eyes flashed electric blue at her from across the chamber. He was dragging all four broomsticks along in his arms – dragging them out of the way.

“Wait,” said Chiân. They all turned and looked at her. Becky stopped, her hand already reaching up. “Stop.”

“Chiân,“ began Pretoria but Chiân wasn’t going to let anyone interrupt her just now.

“Stand back. I’m going to try something.”

“What are you doing?”

Chiân stepped towards the sphere. The memory within it glowed brightly in response to her closeness. As did the tendrils of the partial obscurus. Much more subtly, but the pale gold of the unifying charm was definitely acting upon more than just the thought amidst the darkness.

Chiân stuck her wand through her hair, spearing her ponytail with it, and raised her arms.

“I thought you couldn’t do magic without your wand anymore?” said Asher from behind her. Someone shushed him.

“Stand back,” Chiân said again. “And be ready to react if this goes wrong.” She heard them move and did not look around to verify.

She was thinking of the two Gryffindor girls out on the lake, and the ice crunching apart, rolling, then tipping. A similar feeling had risen in her chest watching Theo coil back in pain, all of them desperately panicked for a horrible moment that they had over-estimated themselves. At first it had been a frightened, guilty tension in her gut, but then, like it had by the lake, some inner force had risen up through her insides and in a quiet, deadly voice, said “ _not again”._

Holding herself carefully in that feeling of lethal, uncompromised power, Chiân raised her hands once more, and pushed with everything inside her.

It was like she could feel the layers of magic around the sphere. Five thick but brittle layers of protective enchantment around a simple but certain net of translucent silver bubble.

Her teeth were grinding with the effort of controlling her magic this precisely, but she had already done it once at the lake, bending a thousand winds towards the ice.

She could almost feel the orb, as if she was actually touching it. She forced these magical fingers through the outer shells. There was an almighty crack, louder than the sound of the first two, as the next layer burst.

Pretoria yelled for them all to duck. Chiân, blood roaring in her head now, barely registered the streaking light of the spell as it burst across the room. She pressed through the next layer, feeling the shape of the enchantment, ripping it open like it was skin.

The boom this one made was like a deep thud. Something else hurtled out from the sphere and crashed into one of the other orbs. Becky yelled something.

Chiân kept going. A noise like a cannon, and a dangerous, hot white flare missed Chiân’s face by an inch. She heard someone scream.

Another explosion, this time answered by several other loud cracks.

Someone was yelling for her to stop but Chiân could not. She was digging into the next layer, trying to penetrate the enchantment. The contents of the orb was obscured as the next spell manifested itself, making the whole sphere shake very hard and very fast – someone was screaming – all Chiân could think was ‘last one’, all she could see in her mind’s eye was an ice sheet, tipping, a hand, outstretched–

 _Boom_.

The sound echoed around the chamber in chaos, answered again by yells from the others. Chiân turned to see Pretoria, Becky, and, Sam, and Ozzy deflecting spears of light with shield charms and cries as they ricocheted around the room. Theo had Asher, clearly having tackled him to the floor a second before. Barely able to process what was happening she saw the freed curses rebounding into the spheres, noises like cannon-fire as the protective layers around the other spheres were shattered.

Horrified, Chiân watched as Becky’s shield charm deflected a white-blue jet of light straight into one of the balls of Fiendfyre. It rippled like a struck gong, and then before any of them could do anything, was hit by another rebounding curse.

The sphere broke. For a split second the fire remained in a tight, compact ball, not seeming to realise that it was unbound.

Then one of the monstrous figures within it burst free. A hawk, made of flame and talons, erupted from the ball, which collapsed. Enormous, deep red flames sprang out into the chamber, great shapes rising like fireballs, their angry, burning roars rising to the vaulted ceiling.

The Fiendfyre burst both orbs on either side of the plinth which no longer contained it. One of them, the single egg, fell and vanished completely. The other, the acrid looking purple mass, was consumed by the flames immediately.

The students were shouting, trying to work out where to go. The fire was rising up across the entrance, licking across the floor exactly where the brooms would have been had Boba not moved them.

Chiân turned her head, looking for the demiguise. He must have known, she thought, and then with a huge effort from her already exhausted body, she summoned the brooms towards them. They came rising through the billowing smoke straight towards the students.

The Gryffindors didn’t think twice, leaping onto the brooms and screaming for the girls to do the same. Pretoria seemed to be begging Sam, wild desperation in her screaming which Chiân could barely hear above the fire. Sam was staring into the Fiendfyre, a look of unadulterated hatred on half of her face.

A creature like an enormous snake, made of the same dense flame, rose before them. Becky grabbed Chiân around the waist and pulled her onto the broom, rising to the top of the chamber out of the reach of the flames as they consumed the next two spheres. One had contained more Fiendfyre, which screamed as it leapt to join the frenzy. The other had been the bones, which also vanished in the roar. With doubled strength the burning serpent coiled itself up to nearly the height of the room, bearing down on Sam.

Its monstrous tail just caught another of the other spheres and a protective curse burst from it. The crack was inaudible over the roar of the flames but they all saw it hit Pretoria square in the chest, throwing her backwards and away from her girlfriend.

Chiân couldn’t hear herself screaming.

Standing alone in the centre of the hall, Sam raised her wand. Chiân could see her mouth moving, shouting a long incantation, eyes fixed on the fiery serpent, sweeping her arm through the air between them. Her wand was drawing a column of rippling white light, which swirled thicker and faster. The snake bared its fangs in a monstrous hiss, but before it could strike Sam threw the rope of light with all her might.

The light cut through the fire, every head of which roared in fury. Sam’s expression was of great focus and power as she cast the light across the fire, rounding up the creatures, forcing them back into themselves. It was as if the white light was water, extinguishing each flame and tendril, chasing it into an oblivion of pale smoke.

Her arms rose and the coils of light wrapped around a column of fire. Sam pulled. The fire gave a last scream of defiance, then curled into nothing. The smoke sank into blackness against the dark stone walls.

Leaning over Chiân, Becky turned the broom and flew back down to the centre of the hall.

Sam had fallen to her knees, visibly shaking, and was crawling to her girlfriend.

Following them down to the ground, Chiân could hear Theo – or maybe Ozzy – behind her in the air going “shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit-“

Pretoria was lying sprawled across the stones. She was jerking and twitching every few seconds and her head and hands were no longer human. Her skin seemed to have vanished – or melted away. They could see the bones in her hands, protruding from the ripped ends of her wrists. Her skull was elongated and strange, and upon getting closer Chiân realised that it was the skull of a deer, complete with short, protruding antlers. The blood seeping from her torn neck and arms was opaque black.

Sam was leaning over her, shaking her shoulders in the same way Theo had done to Ozzy. “Pret, wake up. Pret, please,” she had started to sob, calling to Pretoria through her heaving breaths.

The sight was horrific. Chiân heard one of the boys turn and wretch, hard.

She and Becky knelt beside Pretoria and Sam.

“Is she dead?” Becky whispered to Chiân, sounding frightened for the first time.

“Pret, please, Pret-”

Chiân reached out and touched her twitching chest, feeling for a heartbeat. The black blood was seeping into the knees of her robes. “She’s definitely still alive,” she whispered back to Becky, beneath Sam’s sobs. “Somehow.” She couldn’t take her eyes away from the deer skull.

Chiân’s head was telling her to keep moving, to keep trying things, so that she couldn’t examine too closely what she had done to her closest group of friends – and Pretoria, a sixth year who had made so much time for her, had made her feel welcome and sure.

Into the spiralling susurrus of fear came a shriek. It was Asher. “THERE’S SOMETHING ON ME, THERE’S SOMETHING ON ME.” Chiân and Becky whipped around. Theo was throwing up. Ozzy was stood with him, looking so pale that Chiân thought he might have thrown up as well.

Asher was stood, eyes wide in a kind of twisted half bow, staring in screeching alarm over his shoulder.

Chiân heard a distinct squeak and laughed shakily. “Don’t worry, hey, come here.” She sprang up and crossed to him. “Don’t worry – it’s Boba.”

At his name the demiguise made himself visible, to a gasp from Asher. He was gripping the back of Asher’s robes, looking wary.

Chiân held out her arms to him and he gratefully jumped into them. Without stopping to take in the boys’ looks of shock, Chiân scratched his head and turned back to Pretoria and Sam.

“Help me, Boba,” she said, and tears pricked in her eyes. Boba looked up at her with big, earnest eyes, as if to say ‘I already have, you dingbat’. Suddenly Chiân remembered.

Boba retook his position on her shoulder as she hurried back down to kneel beside the dark, mangled half-skeleton Pretoria. Sam had thrown herself across her torso. The noises she was making were completely wretched.

“Sam I need you to move. Sam, I’m sorry, Sam-“

Becky was listening, and gently prised Sam off her body. Sam didn’t seem to have the strength to protest.

Chiân had pulled from her pocket the strange purple nut Boba had brought her.

“Where in the hell did you get a Guivernian Pod?” said Becky in a low voice, staring at it as she held Sam.

Chiân did not answer. She was trying to prize it open with her fingernails, or crush it between her brightly glowing palms, which now looked blotchy with black blood.

“Allow me,” said a voice. Ozzy had approached, still pale but with a shadow of his cocky smile. He held his hand out for the pod. Chiân gave it to him.

He put it on the ground and stamped on it forcefully. Chiân was about to protest, but then she saw that it had broken into two perfect halves. Each half was full of a gelatinous red cream. Ozzy picked them up carefully and handed them back to Chiân.

Gritting her teeth in tense prayer, Chiân dipped her glowing fingers into it and raised it to Pretoria’s no-longer face.

She touched the base of her neck, where the flesh was bleeding black, and the red substance immediately hissed and sparked slightly. The effect, though, was incredible.

Heart clenching with nauseatingly sudden hope, Chiân quickly continued to lather the red cream across the slick, strange texture of the deer skull. Every place it touched it seemed to congeal and froth, growing quite unmistakeably into skin.

The others were all standing close now, watching. Even Sam, still hiccupping through her tears, was staring.

Chiân coated the deer skull in the thick red cream, and there was a nasty crunching sound. Several of them yelped, but Becky said in wonder, “look – it’s turning back.” She was right. It looked deeply weird, but as the flesh and skin built itself back up across Pretoria’s face the crunching, clicking noises continued as the skull reshaped itself into a human skull.

It seemed though that the cream did not know what to do about the antlers, which remained, sticking up out of her re-forming pate.

Chiân turned quickly to her hands, worrying that there wouldn’t be enough cream left in the shells. It seemed though that she only needed a drop. Again the cream spluttered and reacted as soon as Chiân applied it to her shredded wrists. They all watched in awe as her hands grew back, a reverse erosion taking place across the bones of her fingers as her skin seemed to hiss back into existence.

Chiân wiped her glowing fingers on her sodden robes and they all looked down at Pretoria. Her face was slightly red, and there was still black blood all over her neck and arms, but she was there, balder than ever and now sporting a rather handsome set of small antlers.

The jerking had stopped as well and they could all see her chest rising and falling in slow, peaceful breath. Becky pulled out her wand.

“Enervate,” she said softly, pointing it at Pretoria’s chest. She coughed, spitting up flecks of black blood, and opened her eyes.

Sam gave a hysterical laugh and threw herself once more upon her girlfriend.

Looking bewildered Pretoria sat up, holding Sam as she sobbed into her shoulder. She met Chiân’s eyes. Chiân gave her triumphant grin. Pretoria opened her mouth, then frowned and reached up to touch her head, her eyebrows rising.

“Oh hell yeah, I have _horns_.”

And the intense hush of the chamber was broken. They all laughed, even Sam. Chiân sat back and let out a long, slow breath. She reached up to stroke Boba, who didn’t seem to mind that her shining hands were mottled with black.

The vault was a mess. There were several splashes of vomit where both Theo and Ozzy had thrown up. Where Pretoria and Sam were now sat, Sam’s arms and legs around her girlfriend – both of them clinging on for dear life, it seemed – was a pool of thick black liquid. All of the girls were covered in it. Becky had run her hands through her hair and now looked like she was styling herself after a skunk.

Just over half of the orbs were still intact, retaining at least one of their protective enchantments. Becky and Theo were looking around for any signs of the orb which had held the purple substance.

“It probably got burnt up. I’m guessing the egg did as well,” Becky was saying.

“Yeah, but if it was like a serious curse or something it wouldn’t be destroyed by fire, would it?” said Ozzy, joining them.

“Not normal fire, no. But this was Fiendfyre. Honestly it’s lucky any of us are still alive,” said Becky.

Theo explained to Ozzy. “Fiendfyre is incredibly powerful. It’s one of the only substances that can destroy a horcrux, you know. I’m sure it wouldn’t have a problem with some purple gloop.”

“A what?” said Ozzy, looking at him.

“A horcrux? Jesus fucking Christ, Oz, are you ever going to read the Complete Biography of Harry Potter?”

He waved his hand dismissively. “Ah, nobody has time to read all that.”

“Oscar, you’re doing Defence Against The Dark Arts OWL,” laughed Becky.

“It’s seven books long!” He protested.

“You okay?” said Asher to Chiân quietly. She was standing back a little, surveying the damage. One of the stone pillars just beyond the circle of plinths had been hit by a rebounding curse and a pile of rubble and dust was spilling out from it. It made something in her head shift.

“Yeah. Yeah, just,” she shook herself a little and looked at him. “Incredibly glad nobody’s dead.”

“Me too,” he said, huffing out a breath. “Hey, you did it, though.”

They both turned to stare at the orb which contained a part of Chiân. It was still delicately shimmering over its plinth, unsullied by the debris they had produced.

“Yeah,” she said softly. Boba nudged her cheek encouragingly with his head. For the first time, even after Pretoria, Chiân felt real fear boiling in her stomach.

They walked up to it. Chiân watched it move, silky and serene, the dark mist and the silver strand glowing gold in response to her filthy hands. Her fingers were stinging a bit where she had touched the red cream.

“I don’t know how to do this bit,” she admitted to Asher. “Petrarch’s whole reason for keeping this down here was because they weren’t sure how to separate my memory from the obscurus thing.”

Asher looked at her. “Well, it’s you, isn’t it? You can probably deal with it better than anybody else can.” She looked at him, grateful for his optimism, and he smiled. “You’re kind of the coolest person in this hall. Like, those guys are fifth and sixth years, but it’s you who got us this far.”

“Yeah, it’s also me who nearly killed us all,” Chiân said darkly. “Well, I guess we don’t have to work out how to open it here.”

“Good shout. I don’t want to see what happens if we break any of the other blobs,” said Asher, glancing around at them.

“Hey, Firebug!” called Ozzy. They turned around. “What’s the plan?”

They regrouped in the middle of the vault. Sam and Pretoria had their arms around each other, each puffy-eyed and covered in dried black blood.

Chiân repeated what she had just said to Asher, and they all agreed that opening the orb here in the vault was just about the last thing any of them wanted to do.

“We can’t leave this place looking like this though,” said Becky, gesturing around at the mess. Her nose wrinkled as she looked at the vomit.

“Hey, the house elves,” said Chiân suddenly, looking at Pretoria and Sam.

“What?”

“Didn’t the house elves say you could like, call them anywhere in the castle?”

They blinked at her. “You know, they did.”

“Well, they like cleaning, don’t they?”

“Worth a shot!”

Pretoria stepped back from them all and cleared her throat. “Flossy, could you come here please?”

There was a beat of silence, then a crack which made them all jump, looking panic-stricken at the orbs.

“Hello Miss, and Sirs and other Misses,” said a squeaky voice. On Chiân’s shoulder Boba disappeared again and she felt him crawl back beneath her hair.

Pretoria and Sam greeted the tiny house elf. Flossy’s beaming smile faded as she took in the room around her.

“Misses and Sirs are not supposed to be down here, Flossy is thinking,” she said, nervously tugging at the hem of her tea towel.

“Yeah, well, we had work to do,” said Pretoria airily. “Listen, we’ve made a bit of a mess. D’you think you could possibly deal with it while we get on with some other stuff?”

Flossy’s beam reappeared and she bowed. “It would be Flossy’s very great pleasure, Miss. May I go fetch some helpers, Miss?”

“Yeah, sure,” said Pretoria, laughing.

Flossy made to disappear again, then paused shyly. “Flossy is liking Miss’s very nice antlers, Miss. They are new, I am thinking?”

Pretoria grinned. “Thanks! Yup, brand new.”

The house elf reappeared a moment later with three others, all of whom bowed and warbled their greetings to the students. They were armed with mops and brushes and dustpans, and seemed positively excited at the task ahead of them.

“I’ve never seen a house elf before,” said Asher with interest.

“Weird blighters,” said Ozzy, shaking his head as he watched one of them mop up his vomit. “They have super powerful magic of their own but they’d rather do everything by hand.” He shrugged.

One of them came trotting up to the students. He was holding a pile of robes. “Hello Sirs and Misses! Flossy is noticing that you are needing fresh clothings, Misses,” he said, bowing to the girls, all of whom were indeed filthy.

They laughed and thanked the little elf, who assured them that they would take great care laundering their robes for them and bringing them back to their respective rooms. They sent the boys to the other side of the hall and Becky helped Chiân siphon off some of the worst of the gummed-up black blood from her forearms and shoes. They all changed gratefully.

Sam looked much cheerier now that she was in clean clothes. After vanishing most of the black blood from her limp, pink hair she came over to Chiân, peering at the demiguise with interest. She made a gentle stream of warm bubbles come out of her wand for Boba, who happily rinsed himself off beneath it.

The house elves did an astonishingly efficient job, restoring the chamber in little over half an hour. They bid them all a happy farewell before cracking out of the vault, leaving the students alone and feeling significantly better.

“So,” said Pretoria, hand in hand with Sam as she walked over to the orb. They all looked up at it, the glow matching the brightness of Chiân’s now-clean hands. “Shall we get this bastard upstairs then?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> An audio recording of this chapter can be found here:
> 
> https://soundcloud.com/kristin-briggs/chapter-thirteen-the-music-of-the-spheres-audio-recording/s-MjruBxnratD


	14. Things Seen

The flight back up through the archives was much slower, with Theo and Becky carefully guiding the orb along with them. Chiân was flying with Pretoria again. She seemed to be enjoying herself enormously, considering she had been half-skeleton barely an hour before.

The first obstacle had been getting the bubble through the gateway which led to the vaults. Ozzy and Theo had blasted away enough of the stone doorway that the gate eventually clattered to the floor, still locked but no longer attached to anything. They hadn’t bothered trying to fix it. Becky had pointed out that the ostentatious lack of several spheres was going to be enough of a giveaway that they had broken in, and it wasn’t like they could do anything about those.

Much more difficult was the ascent up the long stairway to the library. They all yelped and shushed each other furiously every time the orb bumped against the ceiling or a wall, despite Pretoria’s reassurances that it wouldn’t pop unless someone touched it. They made it to the top somehow, Sam re-opening the doors into the restricted section and resealing them with her wand once they had all safely landed beyond the threshold.

“I cannot _believe_ we just did that,” said Theo, flopping down onto the floor and looking exhilarated.

They all whispered excitedly about the events down in the archives. All except Chiân, who had not uttered a word since leaving the vault. She found herself unable to take her eyes off the swirling ball of her own memory and magic.

Safely back in the library they had all started arguing about where they could take the sphere that would risk the least collateral damage. Theo was all for sneaking out of the grounds to the Shrieking Shack, which was some place in Hogsmeade. Pretoria suggested the Forbidden Forest, which didn’t seem like a bad shout, but also might be more dangerous than any of them were willing to deal with at that moment.

Chiân had an idea. “Has the lake thawed out?” she asked abruptly, cutting across Ozzy’s suggestion that they do it in Petrarch’s office just to spite him.

“Not entirely, but it’s definitely not thick enough to walk on anymore,” said Becky, anticipating her suggestion.

“Yeah, but you guys could freeze it, right?” said Asher. “Even we know how to do a freezing charm.” He gestured at himself and Chiân.

The older students looked at each other, considering this. Chiân noticed that Sam had also been very quiet since leaving the vault. She was clinging to Pretoria’s arm and looked deeply exhausted.

“That is not a bad shout,” said Pretoria after a moment.

“How are we going to get the blasted thing out there, though? There’s no way we can get this through the castle undetected,” said Theo.

It was Becky who had the idea of taking it out through one of the library windows. Pretoria was all for just smashing them, but Theo and Becky performed a neat set of severance charms, carefully removing a pane at a time from one of the wider windows until there was enough of a gap to fly through.

“We’ll fix them back in and meet you down there,” said Becky as the others got onto their brooms. Pretoria and Sam had already levitated the sphere through the stone frame.

They agreed, and mounted the brooms. Chiân was on a broom with Sam this time, and they followed Pretoria and Asher out through the window.

It must have been around two or three in the morning, thought Chiân as they flew out towards the lake. The air was very cold. She was immensely grateful at the thoughtfulness of the house elves for bringing them robes which weren’t soaked in cursed human blood.

They hadn’t bothered with the disillusionment charms as they flew across the grounds. Each of them had acknowledged and privately squared with the fact that they were facing serious punishment, and it seemed daft to bother worrying about it now.

They waited at the lakeside for Becky and Theo, standing in glum, shivering silence. Once they’d arrived it took the group over an hour to freeze enough of the surface that they weren’t in danger of the ice detaching and falling in. It helped that the night was so cold. The whole week had been cold and there were still large patches of ice floating across the black water.

They started at the shore, walking slowly in a line, each wand pointed downwards, blasting a jet of freezing air to the water. It was tiring work, though the surface froze quickly enough. Chiân insisted that they go far enough out that even in the case of a significant explosion there was no chance that anything but ice would get destroyed.

The night sky was partially cloudy. The moon glanced down for a few minutes at a time, obscured by clouds which threw them intermittently into darkness.

Pretoria had cast the bubble about a third of the way into the lake, which was nearly half a mile. They worked towards it, thickening the ice slowly until they had reached where the orb hung, pulsating slightly with that same soft mix of silvery-gold light. Chiân’s hands glowed, blending with the reflection of the moonlight upon the newly created ice to make a soft haze of light. Boba had hopped down from Chiân’s shoulders when they had reached the lake’s shore, and Chiân had been too distracted to worry about where he had got to. She assumed, or at least hoped, that he had returned to the sanctuary.

They stood at last in a circle of seven around the orb. They were far out into the lake, a thick passage of ice stretching from beneath them back to the edge of the grounds. All of them were shivering, and Chiân could hear a few people’s teeth chattering.

Chiân took a deep breath. “I think you guys should go back to the shore.”

“Don’t be thick-“

“Shut up, Chiân,”

“No can do, Firebug-“

“Don’t bother-”

Chiân had expected this. “Well, at least get the brooms. You can hover around me as I try to deal with this, and if something goes wrong or the ice breaks… you can get me from there,” she said firmly.

They agreed that this wasn’t a bad plan, and Becky and Pretoria summoned the brooms from where they had left them on the shore. They mounted and flew out to the same height as the sphere, protesting again when Chiân tried to make them move further out. They were about thirty feet wide of her, circling slowly. It was deeply reassuring.

Chiân was alone on the ice, stood directly beneath the orb. She took a slow, steadying breath. Remembering what Pretoria had said about breaking the sealing charm she slowly put her wand back into her ponytail.

She raised her arms, thinking of her brother, her parents, herself. Without trying she levitated slightly off the surface of the ice, a hand outstretched…

The silver of the bubble touched her fingertips. She felt the magic surge through both arms, and out through her glowing hands. The light rippled across the sphere, momentarily obscuring the memory and shadow within. Then it dissolved.

For a moment Chiân hovered, her hands glowing brighter than ever – painfully bright – and the shape above her twisted, uncoiling itself, losing its compact shape. She saw the bright thread of memory, golden as it floated down to her fingertips.

And suddenly she was falling upwards. The glow in her hands was gone and she was moving through something cold – spinning, dizzy – then landing firmly onto a dirty cream carpet.

She let out a breath of shock, then scrambled upright, looking around her. She understood immediately that she must be inside the memory: this was the living room of her childhood home. They had moved out of it when she was five but she remembered it clearly. It had been a tiny terraced house, with two rooms downstairs and three upstairs, including a boxy bathroom with a narrow shower cubicle.

Chiân herself was stood in the only bit of floor space free in the living room. She turned at the sound of voices.

“I don’t care, Ferg. I told you you should’ve got rid of it, and you said you _did_ – you lied to me. You lied to _me_ -“ the woman was shouting, jumping up from the dirty blue sofa. It was Chiân’s mother. She looked angry and frightened. It was expression Chiân was bitterly familiar with.

“Susie we’ve gone over this so many times. I’m not getting rid of my wand. Yes, I lied to you, and I’m sorry – but you just don’t understand-” Her dad looked agitated and desperate, but Chiân was distracted by how unlined and young he seemed.

“I don’t CARE,” her mother screamed back. She pointed at his wand, which was on the edge of the coffee table, near the Chiân they could not see. “I don’t CARE if you can’t do magic – you shouldn’t be ABLE to do magic. I have begged and pleaded with you to give it up-“

“How many times, you can’t just give up magic like it’s a hobby, Suse-“

“YOU ARE PUTTING OUR FAMILY IN DANGER – YOU ARE SELFISH – YOU’RE A LYING-“

Chiân heard soft crying. Dazed, she turned and saw a child, sat on the stairs, her face pressed through the banister. She couldn’t have been any older than four. She was small, blonde, and scared. Chiân looked up at herself as the child blubbered and bumped her way down the staircase.

Neither parent noticed their daughter as she toddled up to the coffee table. They were screaming at each other now, and it was an argument Chiân knew well.

A year into their marriage, so her father had told her, Chiân’s dad had shown his wife what he really was. The crippling blow of realising that she did not truly know the man she had married had developed into the deep grief of mistrust, which had festered into fear. Chiân remembered even as a very small child watching that fear become hatred.

She stepped back against the wall now, watching with wide eyes as her four year old self reached out her hands, crying for her parents. They ignored her, tears of their own in their eyes as they screamed at each other. The tiny girl grabbed hold of the nearest thing she could and present-day Chiân heard footsteps on the stairs.

She looked up to see Tian, young and serious, hurtling down the steps, his eyes fixed on his baby sister.

“Chiân,” he yelled urgently, trying to call to her. “Chiân, hey, Chiân, put that down-“

His frightened yells as he reached the living room cut through his parents’ row. They turned to look at their daughter and Chiân’s mother screamed.

The infant Chiân was holding the wand, crying very hard. She wasn’t pointing it anywhere in particular, just clutching it in the panic of anger and noise. Smoke and sparks were coming out of the end as she wailed.

Her dad made to rush forwards. He was looking very scared. “Chiân, baby, hey Chiâny, can you give that to daddy? Can you give me the wand, baby?”

Her mother grabbed her husband, screaming “LOOK WHAT YOU’VE DONE”, half-mad and hysterical with fright.

Tian reached Chiân first.

Older Chiân watched, transfixed. It was like she knew now, like she had fully taken in the memory even as she watched it unfold around her. She knew what was about to happen, and there was nothing she could do – nothing she could have done.

Tian bent towards her, his hand outstretched. The child Chiân gave a heartbroken wail and reached out her own hands towards him, still holding the wand. From the tip of the wand came a violent explosion of light and noise. It hit Tian square in the chest and slammed him upwards into the ceiling. He seemed to hang there for an hour, but Chiân knew it was her own horror slowing the world to a stop.

The ceiling cracked with the impact and Tian, already dead, fell to the floor.

With him came a large sheet of plaster and paint, slowly caving just as the ice had done. Dust and plaster came showering down into the living room. Her dad had leapt away from his wife to grab Chiân, and he pulled her out of the way as the floor above them collapsed. Present day Chiân watched through the dust and rubble as her mother, screaming, pulled Tian’s body out of the debris, sobbing and clutching him, shaking him to wake him up, the same wild desperation on her face that Sam had worn hours before as she crawled over to Pretoria.

Chiân watched her dad prize the wand out of his child’s hands, tears cutting through the dust on his cheeks. He looked at his wife, and Chiân saw the resolve in the set of his jaw.

Present-day Chiân was numb, stood in the same corner of the memory, watching as the police and ambulances arrived, the flashing lights of the emergency vehicles, the worried neighbours in dressing gowns. She watched her mother, head bleeding and arm limp, fight off a paramedic as he tried to put her and Tian onto separate stretchers.

She heard her father talking to the policeman, the child Chiân in his arms, still crying into his shoulder. She heard words like “gas leak” and “didn’t notice in time”. The wand was nowhere to be seen.

Eleven year old Chiân did not move, but the scene around her seemed to dissolve to a grey mass of swirling, soft light, before reforming into the interior of an ambulance. She watched herself looking up into her father’s grief-stricken face, reaching up to pat him, worried at the noises he was making as he cried. They were the only ones in the back of the ambulance. The scene shifted again to the corridor of a hospital. The small girl was watching nervously as her father embraced her mother, who sobbed unceasingly into his shoulder. He was saying the words “I promise, I promise, I promise”, over and over again.

The scene dissolved again, reforming into a blustery graveyard. Chiân’s mother turned away as her daughter reached out for her, her little black dress stained with tears of confusion and fear.

The memory was barely settling now. Chiân’s head was aching as the light swirled and moved. Another argument, scaffolding and For Sale signs, a brief glimpse of her father’s face kindly explaining to her that they were going to be moving house. The words “insurance payout”, the hurt and confusion of her mother snapping at her every time she reached for her. Her father’s face aging faster than it deserved to as he tried to put back together the family she blamed him for ruining. Her mother’s voice, hissing the word over and over again from every angle of her childhood:

“ _Monster”._

It all faded to grey.

-

It felt like at least a year had passed. Chiân wasn’t sure where she was. She was cold, she knew that much.

All she could see in her head was her brother’s face, leaning towards her with urgency, a hand outstretched.

She had killed him. She had killed her brother. All those years of seeing her mother break down at the sight of him was because she knew he was dead, and she knew that her daughter had killed him. He had been a ghost. That’s all. A projection of the sibling she had murdered without knowing she was doing it.

_Monster._

She had buried it, buried the memory within herself. She remembered now how she had missed her brother, wishing very much that he would come back to play with her. Scrunching up her face in the darkness of her bedroom to try to wish him back, giggling with delight when he would appear in front of her, smiling.

She had killed him. She was a murderer. _Monster._

“Tian,” she whispered, his face so clear before her against a dark, swirling world.

He smiled kindly.

She knew with all her heart that she did not deserve that kindness.

“Tian, I’m so sorry. Tian,” feeling was returning to her numb body. A hot agony of feeling falling through her. “Tian,” her voice cracked.

If she had been any less numb she would have been shocked when he replied. “Hey, Chiân.”

“Tian,” she gasped, trying to focus. She still wasn’t sure where she was and she struggled to get upright. There didn’t seem to be anything beneath her.

Her brother smiled at her. He didn’t look pale and translucent like the other Hogwarts ghosts. He looked solid, and real.

“That’s because I’m not a ghost,” he said, answering her thoughts. “I’m a projection. From you.” He pointed at her. They seemed to be floating, encased in a huge ball of dark, moving particles of dust. They swirled through Tian’s body and she saw in wonder that he was made of them.

“You’ve been carrying me around for years, Chiâny, ever since my death.”

Grief, unfelt for nearly a decade, roped itself through her chest as she stared at him desperately.

She couldn’t find her voice.

“I’m not really Tian,” said Tian. “But you needed me, you needed to make sense of what had happened. Look.”

He held out his hands, and almost without meaning to she did the same. The memory was back in her head now, she knew that. She could feel it there, the size of the sky and burning like a sun. But as she reached towards her brother she saw that her hands were still glowing brightly. So were his. In fact the glow ran through his entire body, through his favourite t-shirt and jeans that he had always worn whenever she had thought she’d seen him in her bedroom.

“You’re not an obscurial,” he said. “And I’m not an obscurus. It might be similar magic maybe, I don’t know,” he shrugged, rippling with the movement of the light and dust running through him. “But everything I’m saying now is coming from you. That’s why I’m lighting up, look. I’m you. Just you.” He looked directly into her eyes. “You’re not a monster, Chiân. You never have been.”

“But…” she whispered. “I killed you.”

“Yes, you did,” he said simply. “And you know that now.”

“Tian,” she said, so quietly that a real person would not have been able to hear her. But he was not a real person. Not anymore.

“It wasn’t your fault, Chiân. You’re not a monster. It’s just fear. Just fear and power that none of us knew what to do with. You’re not a monster.

_Monster._

“Tian, I’m so sorry.” He was blurring and shimmering now, but the hotness in her eyes told Chiân this was because of the tears now pouring out of her. “Don’t go.”

“It’s okay, Chiân,” he said.

She shook her head, mostly to clear her eyes of tears, desperate to keep looking at his face.

“It is. Mum and dad love you, you know.”

_Monster._

“I know mum blamed you for so long, but I don’t think she does any more. You know now. When you couldn’t seem to understand where I’d gone it made her so angry. They have never known how to tell you what happened. I think it hurt too much. But you know now. It’s okay.”

“Tian,” she said. She felt like she was four years old again, reaching out for him, desperate for comfort, for safety, for someone to hold her.

“It’s okay,” he said again, and she could see that he was starting to dissolve. He saw the panic in her face. “You should go to mum and dad, Chiân. I’m not here anymore. You know that now. It’s okay.”

She stared into his face as it shimmered into tiny wisps of glowing golden light.

Her hands were still outstretched towards the brother she had killed seven years ago, but he was gone.

Chiân felt the boiling power rise up in her, and she knew this feeling now: it was grief. It built up in her chest like a scream that came from every inch of her body. But she knew now. She knew why her wand had frightened her. She knew why the ice tipping had made her scream _‘not again’_. She knew that magic would always be both death and the preservation of life to her. She didn’t need to try to control this. Her brother was already gone, and she knew that now.

She was pulled upwards by the density of the force building in her chest, and then her head fell back and she let go.

It erupted out of her, scattering both the golden light and the dark, swirling sphere she had been floating in. The night sky re-materialised above her but she did not see it at that moment. The ice many feet below her shattered as the blast radius exploded around her. She screamed but it was lost in the sound.

Exhausted and aching with grief, she felt herself begin to fall out of the air. A very long way off she heard yelling. With vague, unfocused surprise she felt herself winded as something grabbed her, felt arms pulling at her, more yelling, closer this time, and the air rushing by like she was flying instead of falling.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> An audio recording of this chapter can be found here:
> 
> https://soundcloud.com/kristin-briggs/chapter-fourteen-things-seen-audio-recording/s-aOFHakbjo2w


	15. Sun It Rises

“Oh God, oh my God, oh God, oh SHIT, oh my God-“

“Shut up, Ziento, for fuck’s sake.”

“Oh my God, oh my God, oh my GOD-“

“OZ,” yelled several people at once.

“Chiân, can you hear me? Chiân?” A closer, gentler voice.

“Firebug,” said another voice. “Are you awake?”

Chiân was staring up towards the sky. Her eyes were open but she wasn’t sure what she was looking at.

“I think she’s in shock.”

“Chiân, can you hear me?” said the gentle voice again.

“What d’you think happened to her?”

Chiân felt pleasantly numb, lying on the cool grass, a peaceful amount of nothing going on in her head. She wasn’t sure what she had been thinking about just now, but the ache in her chest made her think it might have been quite stressful. She was fine not being able to remember it for the moment.

“Shit.”

“Do you think we should go wake up a teacher?”

“Are you joking?”

“Look, we’re all gonna get expelled anyway.”

“Shut up, Wells.”

Someone was taking her pulse, fingers on her wrist. Her other hand was being held by someone who was gripping tightly. “Her hands aren’t glowing anymore, look. I guess that’s a sign that something happened in that dust cloud.”

Dust. It was a word which painted many pictures. Like living room ceilings folding inwards, or like her brother’s face, smiling at her, golden and haunting.

“Ah, shit,” she said out loud. She blinked a few times and felt her mind begin to knit itself back into coherence. She found her arms again and the people next to her let go of her hands. She pulled herself up into a sitting position. They were all watching her. She said the only thing she could think in that moment. “So… I killed my brother.”

There was a long silence, in which Chiân stared out across the lake and the others stared at her.

“Well, shit,” said Pretoria at last, absently touching one of her antlers.

“What happened, Firebug?” This was Becky’s voice.

Chiân was still looking out across the lake. The ice around the shoreline nearest them was still there, but the rest was in chunks. She remembered the feeling of being at the centre of that explosion and rubbed her chest gingerly. “I went into the memory. I was four,” she said. Her head was beginning to spin a little as it all rose up, wave after wave.

She didn’t want to look at any of them. Far across the lake the first lightenings of dawn were soaking into the dark horizon. “My mum and dad… they were fighting. Mum’s a muggle. She didn’t like magic… I was upset. I picked up a wand…”

She wasn’t sure she could continue. She could still see Tian’s face in her mind, flashing between the anxious, wide-eyed boy who had reached towards her and the glowing projection above the lake.

_Monster._

Her eyes welled with liquid and she looked down, blinking furiously.

“’S’okay,” murmured someone.

“I killed him,” she said bluntly.

“It’s not your fault,” said Sam quietly.

Chiân snapped. “That’s what Tian kept saying. I killed him. _I_ picked up the wand, _I_ did the magic. It was _me._ How is that not my fault?” Frustrated with herself for crying, she shoved her palms into her eyes and rubbed furiously.

“Listen, Chiân,” said Sam, and there was steel in her tone. “When I was ten my dad tracked down me and my mum. She’d left him because he’d got violent when he found out she wasn’t entirely pure-blood. He was one of those fanatics who thinks that the reign of You Know Who was the good old days.” There was such venom in her voice that Chiân forgot she was crying.

“We’d been in hiding out at my mum’s sister's for nearly a year. He arrived in the middle of the night. Didn’t even wake us up before setting the house on fire.”

The Gryffindors were exchanging looks. Chiân noticed that Asher was sat right next to her, looking traumatised. It was he who had been holding her hand.

“He’d used Fiendfyre, though,” Sam continued, not looking away from Chiân. “And the bastard couldn’t control it. I saw it consume him. I remember my mum trying desperately to put it out with water and screaming for me to run. I was reaching out for her when it took her too. My aunt had to grab me and run from the house. My uncle knew the charm to put it out though, thank Merlin, or I would have died in seconds.” Pretoria’s hand in Sam’s was white-knuckled.

“I blamed myself for so many years, Chiân. I still do-“ Pretoria opened her mouth but Sam waved her quiet. “But it was a real turning point when I realised that there’s a huge difference between the guilt of letting something happen and the grief of not knowing how not to.”

Chiân shook her head. “That’s different. You didn’t cause the fire-“

“But I didn’t know how to put it out, either. I thought for so long that if I had only known the spell – if my mum had only known the spell – then she wouldn’t be dead. I mean, if my dad had known the spell to put it out he wouldn’t be dead either, but I don’t really give a shit about him.” She wrinkled her nose. “I made my uncle teach me the counter-charm – the only thing which fights Fiendfyre. It’s a very specific and very difficult piece of magic. I practiced it every single day for about five years. It was like if I knew it well enough it could negate the one moment when I hadn’t know it – when I didn’t even have a wand.”

She sighed heavily. “Then I finally worked out that I could be as good as I like at putting out Fiendfyre, but that wouldn’t make it any more or less my fault for not knowing how to do it when I was ten. Chiân, you were four. You didn’t know what you were doing. You can try all you like to rewrite that memory, and I’m guessing you basically have been trying to rewrite it or we wouldn’t all be out here at God knows what time of morning, but it doesn’t change the fact that you didn’t know what you were doing.”

They looked into each other’s eyes for a long, silent moment. Somewhere, somehow, the birds had awoken. They began to sing in the dawn.

“Thank you,” said Chiân quietly. The awfulness within her was far from gone, but at least she could breathe.

“And frankly, thank fuck you were so obsessed with learning that charm, or else we’d all be dead.” said Ozzy in a matter-of-fact voice. They all laughed, mostly out of weak relief.

Sam grinned at him. “You’re welcome.”

Pretoria, looking uncharacteristically tender, leaned in to kiss her girlfriend, then pulled Chiân to her feet. “We should get back up to the castle.”

“Yeah, I’m exhausted.”

The others agreed, but Chiân stayed where she was. She was remembering Tian’s face, the Tian she had projected to protect herself for so many years.

“You okay, Firebug?” said Becky, noticing. They all turned.

“I have to go see my parents,” she said.

“Yeah, but you don’t have to go right n-“ started Ozzy, before Theo kicked him.

She shook her head. “I don’t want to wait anymore. I already haven’t written to my dad in like two months and I don’t think I’m going to be able to do anything else until I’ve seen him. Both of them.” She swallowed slightly at the thought of facing her mother, but she knew it was the right thing to do.

“Do you know if there’s, like, any secret way to get out of the grounds?”

Pretoria answered. Bizarrely, the antlers really did suit her. “I mean, the gates are gonna be locked with enchantments even you probably can’t blow up. We could try flying, though I bet there’s probably enchantments against humans leaving through the air.”

“Humans?” said Becky.

“Well, think of all the shit that lives in the forest. They all go in and out of the bounds of the school all the time, don’t they?”

“I’d never thought of it like that-“

“You’re not coming with me,” said Chiân, who had frowned at the ‘we’.

“Don’t bother, Ch-“

But she was determined this time. “No. I’m going on my own. I don’t give a shit, Ash, you’re not getting into any more trouble on my behalf.”

Pretoria and Sam were glaring at her. Sam opened her mouth to argue, but Chiân softened her approach.

“Please. Please let me do this. I need to see them, and I’ll be fine on my own. You guys can sneak back in to bed and you have to promise me you’ll let me take the fall for everything when they find all the mess down there. No, shut up. I’m being serious about this,” and she was. She felt the resolve she had inherited from her father as she lifted her chin and set her jaw. “I’m gonna get expelled anyway for sneaking out of the school grounds in the middle of the night. If you can get away with scapegoating me – if they don’t come looking for anybody else then you guys all get to stay here and like, carry on with your lives and shit, okay?”

“But that’s not f-“

“If I wanted justice or fairness, I would’ve brought a bunch of Hufflepuffs and Ravenclaws, okay?” she cut Becky off. Reluctantly, the Gryffindor girl smiled at her.

“Okay. Okay, fine, but how are you even going to leave?”

What Pretoria had said about the creatures in the forest had given her an idea. Before she even had time to voice it, however, she felt a small tug at her robes. She looked down and saw Boba ripple into visibility. He was looking up at her with his small, wrinkled face and round, gorgeous eyes. He looked keen – almost pleased.

“Oh hey there, little fella,” she made to pick him up, but he scampered away, silky hair gleaming and fluttering in the early breeze. “Oh my God, Boba, you genius,” she said, laughing. Just up the knoll was a glistening, scaly black horse, trotting softly towards them. Its bony, reptilian wings stretched and quivered delicately above it.

“What’s happening?” whispered one of the guys.

“He brought me a thestral,” said Chiân, reaching down and scratching Boba’s head. He hummed in a self-satisfied sort of way. “You clever, clever boy.

“A what?” said Asher, and Chiân heard someone explain them to him quickly.

“Hey Asher, can you look after Boba for me?” Chiân scooped him up and beckoned to Asher. Boba climbed up his arm and perched on his shoulder once more. Asher didn’t freak out this time. “Make sure he gets back to the sanctuary tomorrow before they miss him.”

“Today, you mean,” said Asher, nodding his head to the creeping sunrise.

She smiled at him. “Thanks. For everything.” She looked away quickly, before she could blush.

“Are you absolutely sure about this?” said Sam, coming in for a hug.

“Yes. Dead sure,” she said, hugging her and then Pretoria.

“Well then, at least take this,” Sam was taking off the outer cloak of the robes the elves had brought her. “You’re gonna need it if you’re flying.”

“Wait,” said Becky. “If you put a disillusionment charm on it as well then you’ll be at least reasonably camouflaged.”

“Good thinking,” said Sam, who pulled out her wand and tapped it. The cloak looked strangely like it was melting into the air.

“Thanks, guys,” said Chiân, oddly touched by this foresight. She took the extra cloak and wrapped it around her shoulders, impressed at the effect. “Okay. Time to go.”

To her delight the three Gryffindor fifth years hugged her as well, briefly but tightly.

She thanked them each profusely. Ozzy waved dismissively once more and said sincerely that it was the most fun he had possibly ever had.

She turned back to the thestral. It was looking at her patiently. She stroked its obsidian flank, awed again by the dark elegance of the creature, then, seeming to anticipate her, it knelt down so that she could climb onto its back.

“Oh my God that is so weird,” she heard Ozzy say, and several of them chuckled in agreement. The thestral stood up again, Chiân safely nestled behind its wings. “Oh that is SO fucking weird.”

Chiân turned and said goodbye. She didn’t feel remotely tired, but she could see the exhaustion on each of their faces. It had been a long night indeed. Despite their fatigue they all smiled at her, looking slightly apprehensive and mostly amused as she floated along on a creature they couldn’t see.

The thestral started to canter towards the lake and Chiân lost sight of them. It leapt at the edge of the water and its beautiful, ethereal wings stretched out wide. They were flying.

Chiân wound her hands into its black mane and twisted around as they soared across the water. The other were waving at her from the shore.

She grinned as she turned back to face the sunrise.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> An audio recording of this chapter can be found here:
> 
> https://soundcloud.com/kristin-briggs/chapter-fifteen-sun-it-rises-audio-recording/s-S8hH5DK0HWt


	16. There and Back Again

It was mid-afternoon by the time Chiân and the thestral caught their first glimpse of London. They had stopped four times, mostly in fields, so that the thestral could recuperate or Chiân could find a convenient bush. She was sorely wishing she had stopped to take some food with her, or maybe a bottle of water.

She was also bitterly cold, despite wearing two cloaks. She was deeply appreciating Sam and Becky’s prescience in thinking to disillusion the extra cloak, because she wasn’t sure she could have survived the cold if they’d had to fly any higher. The extra layer was proving vital, even if the concealment it offered was patchy at best. It helped that most people would not be able to see the thestral anyway, and Chiân was fairly confident that nobody would think anything of the small, indistinct dark shape soaring above them on a Saturday afternoon.

Chiân had decided to call the thestral ‘Steve’, because it was about the farthest thing from a thestral-like name she could think of. She had no idea how to tell if Steve was male or female, but she also doubted that it cared if the strange girl riding it was misgendering it. She was definitely feeling tired now, but was leaning over Steve’s neck, watching the growing mass of suburban streets below them, trying to figure out where exactly they were.

She was not so tired that she couldn’t appreciate the spectacular view beneath her. Her ears were numb and full of the ripping of wind but her mouth fell open behind her pulled up robes. She could see central London, hazy and bright in the sunlight. It was a long way off but still helpful as a navigation tool.

Her parents’ house was out near Buckhurst Hill, just outside of Redbridge, Essex. Chiân pulled Steve’s mane a little, trying to communicate that they should go left. Steve seemed to understand. Still wary of going too low, Chiân and Steve circled around towards North East London, Chiân peering down through the astonishing distance.

She thought she could make out a railway, and soon she was directing Steve with confidence out into the smaller towns of Greater London. She could tell Steve was getting tired, and she patted its neck encouragingly.

Within another twenty minutes Chiân had spotted a familiar tube station, and it was only a short time later that they were soaring downwards towards her parents’ tiny backyard.

Steve reared back, wings flapping. Chiân held on for dear life as they landed loudly on the roof of the back porch.

Chiân’s stomach was too empty and her head too numb with cold and exhaustion to feel panic now, but she suddenly realised she hadn’t prepared for this bit at all.

She was about to see her mother and her father, who had no idea she was coming. For one bizarre moment she wondered frantically what would happen if it turned out they had moved house, but then she heard, very distinctly, her dad’s voice from below her.

“I’ll go check, Suse. Probably an idiot bird that flew into a window or something.” And before Chiân could do anything, or give her presentation a second of thought, her father had stepped out of the porch and looked up.

“What-“

They stared at each other for a very long, very surreal minute.

“Um, hi dad. Can you help me down?” she said eventually.

“What in the bloody name of – what – _Chiân_?” he spluttered, then looked in alarm at Steve. “Is that a _thestral?”_

Chiân looked in surprise from her dad to the thestral, and then back at her dad. She’d not thought about it but she supposed it should have been obvious that her dad would be able to see them too. “His name is Steve. If it’s a ‘he’ – I dunno how you tell. We flew here. Look, can I come down?”

Looking too taken aback for words, her dad raised his arms and caught her as she slid off the roof of the porch. Steve made a neat leap down, hooves clattering on the four square metres of concrete slabs which made up their back yard.

Her dad wrapped her into a hug. She was shaking, but mostly out of cold. “What in the hell are you doing here, kid? Is everything okay?”

Chiân opened her mouth, curious to find out what she was going to say. They were interrupted by a scream from her mother, who had appeared in the back door wearing a pale pink dressing gown, ghostly white with shock. Her eyes were fixed on Steve.

It took about half an hour to calm her mother down and explain that the creature pawing nervously around her very small yard was in fact not a demon that was here to portend her imminent demise. Chiân felt slight chagrin at not having anticipated this reaction, but then it did have the added benefit of making Chiân’s sudden appearance something of a secondary matter.

Soon Chiân was tucked up on the sofa in several blankets, holding a cup of boiling tea gratefully through her robes. The disillusionment charm seemed to have faded completely from Sam’s. Her dad had made her a plate of toast, which she was chewing nervously, watching her dad talk quietly to her mother in the kitchen.

Now that Chiân had warmed up and eaten something she was having trouble not dozing off. It had been a very, very long night.

She drained the rest of her tea as her parents came back in.

They sat down opposite her, looking very serious.

“Alright, Chiân, tell us what’s going on. Why are you here?” said her dad. The gentleness and concern in his face overwhelmed her and she had to blink quickly for a moment.

With careful, deliberate movements she placed her mug firmly on the laminate flooring. It was so strange to be back here, surrounded by familiar and completely alien muggle things.

“I’m not sure where to start,” she said, avoiding looking at her mother. Her eyes fell on the windowsill. In front of the blinds, which were only half open, were both of the Christmas cards she had sent – one for her parents, and one for Tian. Chiân burst into tears.

Chiân cried harder than she had ever cried in her life, unsure if it was exhaustion, grief, desperation, anxiety, or just some horrible combination of all of them at once. Her dad came and sat beside her, looking extremely worried, and after a few minutes her mother left the room. Chiân was just ready to despair, thinking that once more she had turned away from her daughter, when her mum came back in with a fresh cup of tea. She sat down on the floor in front of Chiân and offered it to her.

It was this peace offering, this tiny sign of love that was as big as anything else that had happened that night, which finally unstuck her tongue. Chiân had meant to tell them a brief version, but once she started talking she couldn’t stop.

She told them all about libation week, about doing magic without a wand, about being afraid of wands and the shattering windows of classrooms – her mother’s knuckles went very white during this part – about lessons and Vesper and Lydia and Asher, Pretoria, Sam, Egan, Calix, Kyril and Benji, about making friends with the Gryffindors, about the wonderful, mind-boggling creatures in the Rubeus House and Gardens, about flying, about blowing up broomsticks and waking up in the hospital wing, about the headmaster and counselling sessions with Mrs Pemberton, about Christmas day and reading the card from her dad.

It was at this point that her mum started crying, but she had gestured for Chiân to keep going. Chiân cried too, pausing every time her throat threatened to close up. She talked about Tian, about the unnerving way she had been remembering him, the confusion and fear of beginning to put two and two together.

She told them about the stupid, dangerous, ridiculous, trumped-up plan she had made with her band of school-friends. She told them about the unifying charm, about Boba, about broomsticks and friends and magic and fear. She did not tell them about the vault, nor finding and accidentally unleashing the secret library of fire – she figured they didn’t need that bit. She told them about her friends risking so much to help her put her head back together again, after so, _so_ long.

She talked and talked, talked about Tian and pain, self-denial, grief, magic. She told them everything that had happened high above the lake, re-watching the memory for the first time, reliving it all, the outstretched hands and the terror, about Tian and how his glowing hands had matched hers, about what he had said to her, about finally, finally knowing what she had done – what had happened – knowing now what had been wrong all these years.

Her mother put her face against Chiân’s knee and cried.

Chiân’s father didn’t say anything, but when Chiân looked up at him his expression was both grief-stricken and proud.

And then her parents talked. They talked about that night, reliving it with her all over again. They told her about the years of marriage counselling, of compromise and anger, of bitter arguments and desperately clinging to each other in the face of grief and fear. Her dad told her how he had snapped his wand two weeks after that night, promising to his wife that that was it, forever. They told her about the terror of seeing Tian’s face sometimes in Chiân’s room, of spotting him out of the corner of their eyes, of fearing that they were losing their minds, that something dangerous was happening to their daughter now as well.

Her mother talked about trying so desperately to separate the agony of losing Tian from her reactions to Chiân, about hating herself for failing, about fearing the growing signs of magic Chiân had showed as she got older.

They talked about the confusion they felt and the bewilderment in how Chiân had spoken about her brother. They talked about the fights they had had, about fearing that their daughter was haunted, of her mum blaming that night where Chiân had picked up the wand for the loss of both of her children, of her dad gripping onto his remaining two family members even as they seemed to be moving irreparably apart.

Chiân found herself apologising, saying ‘sorry’ over and over again, the years peeling back as she did so, reaching for her mother, trying to bridge the gap. She said sorry for not knowing, she said sorry for hurting her, she said sorry for being a monster – sorry for killing him – sorry for ever picking up the wand. Sorry for everything.

Her mother only gave one sorry in reply, but it was enough.

It was a long and strange day.

The catharsis, once over, had exhausted them all. Chiân had fallen asleep right where she sat, swaddled in blankets and the embraces of both parents.

She woke up once or twice and staggered to the toilet, then staggered back and faded into sleep again.

In the evening her mother had shaken her gently into consciousness. She had made Chiân’s favourite little quiches, and they ate them together as a three, all sat on the sofa, watching mundane game shows on the tv. Her dad had asked her if she knew what thestrals ate. As a matter of fact Chiân did know, having helped Gale feed the injured foal in the sanctuary once or twice, and he had popped down to the corner shop to buy several packs of raw steak and two large tubs of ice cream, though these were not for the thestral.

Fed and watered, Steve had taken off that evening and not returned. Chiân figured that it probably wanted to return to the forest in the school grounds, and she thought briefly of the castle. She wondered if the teachers had noticed her absence yet – it was the weekend, after all. She wondered if the others had gotten back to their dormitories okay, if Pretoria had thought of an explanation for her antlers, if they had been found out already or were waiting anxiously for that foot to drop. With a pang she remembered Vessy’s earnest assurance that she and Lydia would wait up for her.

She wished she had some easy way to contact them all, and thought vaguely that if she was going to be expelled then she may not even get to see them again.

She stayed with her parents for the whole of the next week. It was deeply weird to wake up in her old bedroom, to come downstairs late every morning and share a tentative smile with her mum, who had taken the week off work for her. They did a lot of tentative smiling that week. Chiân felt almost shy around her, not quite knowing how to speak to her now that their conversations weren’t all blazing rows.

Her mum was trying very hard, and asked questions about Chiân’s lessons, about her professors and classmates. Chiân was nervous to answer these things at first, but as the reaction kept being one of interest rather than fear, she began to talk more freely. Chiân liked the evenings best, when her dad was home as well. He would put his Tom Petty records on and dance with her, making a fool of himself and laughing, his wife curled up on the sofa, sometimes singing along, sometimes watching them with a pensive smile on her face.

And they talked about Tian – tearfully at first, but then with laughter. They shared memories about him and put on his favourite Fats Domino records as they ate dinner. Chiân could feel herself healing a little, starting on the mammoth task of putting back together things that had been sundered for seven years.

That first night Chiân had stuffed her wand and school robes into the bottom of her chest of drawers, and out of her mind. For a week she forgot about Hogwarts, forgot about house points and demiguises, about Psychomancy and homework, and she got to be a kid again.

It couldn’t last forever, though. Seven days after her unexpected arrival on top of their porch, Chiân’s parents raised the subject at lunchtime.

“So, Chiâny,” her father frowned solemnly, though his eyes twinkled. “What’s this about you skiving lessons?”

Chiân coughed through her soup. “What?”

He laughed.

“We loving have you here, sweetheart,” said her mum, “but you _are_ in the middle of a school term.”

Chiân stared at them both.

“I know you’re probably itching to get back to Hogwarts. I know I would be,” said her dad.

Chiân opened her mouth, then closed it again, unsure how to respond. The thought of Hogwarts had been growing in the back of her mind, but though she loved the castle there was part of her which wanted to stay in this rosy, peaceful week forever.

“Actually, I kinda thought you might not want me to go back,” she said eventually, looking glumly into her soup.

“Oh Chiân, honey, why?”

Chiân looked up at her mother in surprise.

“You hate magic, don’t you?” Chiân was confused.

Her mother gave a great sigh. “Maybe,” she said with reluctant honesty. “But Chiân, I’ve listened to you talk this week about all your friends, about the animals you’re getting to meet – the castle, which sounds wonderful – and, well… You just light up, sweetie.” She smiled at Chiân, whose heart was clenching again.

“You know, kiddo, for someone so amazingly bright you can be a bit dim,” teased her dad. “Of course we want you go back to school.”

Chiân gaped at them, looking from face to face. Then she spluttered, “the night I left on Steve – I mean, I’d kinda been trying not to think about it because, well, I mean I’ve almost definitely been expelled, right?”

“Don’t be so sure,” her dad replied, leaning back. “I mean, for one thing it’s not like they wouldn’t be able to find you if they tried. The fact that you haven’t received an owl this week tells me that you probably haven’t been.”

“You reckon?” Chiân’s heart leapt.

“Oh, sure. In fact, we’ve been talking about how best to get you back up there. Do you have your wand?”

“Uh, yeah, it’s upstairs,” she looked nervously at her mother, but to her astonishment she was still smiling calmly.

“Well, I haven’t done it years but if you like I could bring you by side-along-apparition up to Hogsmeade. You can’t apparate into the school grounds, as you may know.”

Chiân nodded dumbly.

“I meant to ask – you mentioned a school counsellor – Mrs Pemberton, was it?”

“Yeah,” said Chiân.

“Do you know her first name? Or, by any random chance, her husband’s name?”

“Er, her name’s Penelope, I think. Why?”

“Aha! I knew a Henry Pemberton while I was there, and he started dating a girl called Penelope in his final year. They were two years above me. Both prefects. I bet that’s her.” He gazed fondly into the empty air, reminiscing. “Penny put me in detention once.”

To Chiân’s absolute shock, her mother giggled. “Why?”

He gave her a mischievous grin. “I let a niffler loose in the girl’s dormitory to get back a girl called Hester.”

“And what did poor Hester do?” asked her mother, a matching grin on her face.

Her dad rolled his eyes. “Oh, I don’t remember. It was almost certainly something to do with beating me in a charms test or something.”

Chiân could not remember her mother ever participating in a conversation about her dad’s school years with anything like the ease she was showing now. Not only this, but her mother seemed to understand all the things her dad was mentioning. Chiân wondered at how much had changed in the months she had been absent. She reflected for the first time that perhaps the healing had started without her, and her arrival a week ago had been the final piece of a puzzle her father had been putting back together for years.

They talked it over some more and Chiân found herself incredulously asking again and again if they were sure they were okay with her going back. When her father had thrown his hands in the air in exasperation she finally broke into a delighted grin.

At his behest she ran upstairs to get her wand so that he could practice apparition. Chiân stood with her mother as they watched him disappear with a satisfying pop, then heard him yell from upstairs in triumph.

They agreed that the next day, Sunday, she and her father would apparate up to Hogsmeade, and he would walk her back to the castle.

Not having brought anything but the robes on her back, her wand, and a long-since departed thestral, Chiân did not have much to do in the way of packing. She spent the final evening at home with them the same way they had spent her first evening there, squashed onto the sofa watching mindless TV. Chiân felt like the world couldn’t possibly be any better.

The next day she woke up earlier than she had all week, heart fluttering with nerves and excitement at the thought that she would be back at Hogwarts by the end of the day.

Her mum laughed at her inability to sit still at breakfast. They shared a last cup of tea, by the end of which Chiân was positively bouncing.

At half past ten she stood with her father in the middle of the living room. It was strange to see him holding her wand – even stranger to watch her mother give her husband a kiss as he held it, then step back to hug Chiân goodbye.

The parallels of the scene were not lost on Chiân, as she suspected they were not lost on her parents. It was not the same living room, nor the same wand, but for a moment before they left, it felt like Tian was there, too.

Her dad had described what apparition felt like to Chiân last night, but it didn’t prepare her for the horrible squeezed feeling that gripped her. She could feel her dad, holding her tightly to his side, and just as she tried to draw breath and quell the panic, her chest released again.

They were in a small village. Chiân took a gasp of air and coughed for a second while her dad made a satisfied noise.

“Man, it’s been decades since I saw this place,” he said, beaming around him.

They were just next to a familiar train station. Chiân turned around and with a rush of happiness saw the towers and turrets of the castle, looking both ancient and brand new in the crystalline light of the Sunday morning.

Her dad handed her wand back to her and they walked through the village. He chatted to her excitedly about all his memories in Honeydukes sweet shop, or the Three Broomsticks pub, which he called the most important wizarding establishment since Hogwarts itself. They saw a few witches and wizards out and about, all of them giving them a cheerful wave or a nod as they passed by in the crisp March air.

They were just getting to the edge of the village, ready to start on a path up to the castle, when a voice called out in amazement.

“Fergus? Chiân!”

They both turned, and saw Mrs Pemberton standing in the doorway of the closest house.

“Penny!” Her dad said, laughing.

A little girl peered around Mrs Pemberton’s legs, looking shyly at Chiân and her father.

Delighted, Mrs Pemberton called them in for a cup of tea, winking at Chiân in a way which assured her that at the very least she was not expelled.

It was well in step with the strangeness of the week, watching her dad catch up on nearly twenty years with her school counsellor and her husband. Chiân listened to them laughing and exclaiming about old teachers and life since graduating Hogwarts. Mrs Pemberton’s house was messy, but in a reassuring, comfortable kind of way.

The little girl had told Chiân that her name was Pepper, and then dragged her to the floor to play with her toys. They were much like the baby toys Chiân remembered except these ones floated, or made unsettlingly real giggling noises if you squeezed them. A boy a few years older than Pepper had come running in to demand attention, and before Chiân knew it Mrs Pemberton was laying the table for lunch and demanding that they stay.

Pepper and her brother Tom – short, as he told her repeatedly, for Tomothy – sat on either side of Chiân, talking loudly and happily to her at the same time as each other.

As they finished eating Mrs Pemberton told her kids to go play in the garden. The kids protested, but she persuaded them with a promise that Chiân could come back and play some time soon.

Chiân watched them chase each other out the back door, then looked up at Mrs Pemberton. She was watching Chiân with a knowing, pleased sort of look on her face.

The two men were chatting away next to them, not seeming to notice the significant look being exchanged.

Chiân broke the silence first, taking a deep breath. “So. How much trouble am I in?”

Mrs Pemberton chuckled. “None at all.”

Chiân raised her eyebrows, completely unconvinced.

“Well, okay, there was some commotion at the beginning of the week – especially when you didn’t show up to a single lesson on Monday. But then, you know, word got round-“

“What word?” said Chiân abruptly. “Sorry – go on.”

“Word that you were in fact no longer in the castle. We were all getting frantically worried – all the staff, I mean. Especially when Mr Bruch informed us that _somebody_ had broken into the vaults below the library.” Her eyes twinkled slyly. “Though it was the strangest thing. Several of the artifacts were missing from the vault, but there seemed to be no sign of the damage we would have expected if somebody had tried to take, say, an isolated obscurus, curtailed Fiendfyre, and a semi-hatched basilisk egg.”

“That was a basilisk egg?” Chiân said in alarm and Mrs Pemberton laughed.

“I don’t know how you did it, Chiân, but you and your friends must have pulled off some extraordinary magic to get out of that vault in one piece. Even if some of you did come out with a few more, ah, extremities than before.”

Chiân blinked, then realised she meant Pretoria’s antlers, and laughed. “They’re not in trouble, are they?”

Mrs Pemberton sighed, smile fading a little. “The older students have had all Hogsmeade visits revoked for the rest of the year, not to mention a month of rather rigorous detentions. As for you and Asher, well, I imagine you shall have to sit through something of a lecture from Professor Petrarch just as he did, but we’re mostly just relieved none of you died.”

Chiân let out a long breath, relief flooding through her.

“Guilliame wanted to suspend the others and force them to re-take the year to teach them a lesson, but I managed to convince him that the last thing we needed was an extra year of Oscar Ziento and Theodore Wells running around the castle.”

Chiân grinned in spite of herself. “If you don’t mind me asking, um, Mrs Pemberton-“

“Chiân, call me Penny. Many students do,” she said kindly.

“Oh, thanks. Um, how did you know who was with me in the vault?”

Penny gave her a look. “You are one of the brightest, most self-aware first years I’ve met in my time here, but you do have a lot to learn. There are a lot of security measures in the school which are far subtler than Caterwauling charms and locking enchantments. Mr and Mrs Bruch are very good at their jobs.”

That seemed to be the end of the answer, and Chiân didn’t push for any further information.

After another cup of tea for Chiân and a butterbeer for the dads, Penny offered to walk Chiân up to the school so that her dad could get back to London. Chiân would be taking her wand with her, and as her father no longer had one of his own he would be taking the slow way back home – via train.

Henry suggested however that he could use their fireplace – they both knew Sigmund, the man who had been mediating Chiân’s letters to and from her family all year, and though his house was on the other side of London from theirs it was most definitely connected to the floo network. Her dad agreed, delighted at the many hours this would save him.

He gave Chiân a tight hug, kissing her on the top of the head and telling her to write as soon as possible, then with a pinch of powder and a roar of green flames, he was gone.

Chiân walked up to the castle with Penny, asking more questions about what she had missed – about whether her other teachers were angry and how much homework would be waiting for her. By the time they entered the grounds, looking dazzling in the warm spring air, she was almost levitating with impatience to see her friends.

First, though, there was the business of facing the headmaster.

Chiân followed Penny up through the castle, her joy of being back within its walls only slightly marred by their trajectory.

The Griffin stepped aside for them, this time to Penny’s brisk “daffodilleries”, and they climbed the now-familiar wooden steps once more.

They reached the top, and Chiân’s counsellor stepped aside, gesturing for her to announce herself to the miniature wood nymph on the door.

“Uh, Chiân Maeroris, here to see Professor Petrarch,” she said. Then added “again” for good measure.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> An audio recording of this chapter can be found here:
> 
> https://soundcloud.com/kristin-briggs/chapter-sixteen-there-and-back-again-audio-recording/s-siACWbCdcGo


	17. Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon

Professor Petrarch was having an afternoon cup of tea with none other than Mr Wiseman, the wandmaker.

Mr Wiseman met Chiân’s eye as she entered the office, and gave her a strangely satisfied smile through the golden monocle in his eye. She did not have time to unpack this look, however, because Petrarch had leapt to his feet and was shouting before Chiân had even cleared the space to his desk.

Wiseman had offered her his chair before the headmaster’s desk and was now pacing slowly along the office, listening to everything that was being said.

Petrarch berated Chiân for every individual instance of stupidity she had committed the previous Friday, which took him quite a while. Chiân was pleased to note that, though he was being thorough, there were plenty of parts he seemed to be unaware of – namely the worst of the events in the vault, and their freezing of half the lake.

Running out of synonyms for ‘stupidity’ and ‘risk’, Petrarch moved on to railing about the irresponsibility of disappearing from the castle without notifying anybody, and failing to send an owl at any point to tell them she was okay.

Chiân thought it probably best not to point out that she didn’t have an owl and neither did her parents and if they had wanted to _they_ could have sent an owl to _her._

It was hard to quail under his furious gaze with Mr Wiseman throwing her looks of amused respect from behind Petrarch’s back. Not to mention Penny’s comforting presence just behind her, arms crossed but eyes remaining kind and patient.

Chiân sat quietly, waiting for the last of the steam to be emitted.

He ended by telling her that he was going to dock no fewer than five hundred points from Slytherin for her actions. The harshness of this pronouncement was rather undermined as one of the portraits on the wall helpfully pointed out that owing to the number of points he had already taken from Chiân’s friends Slytherin house was currently standing at an impressive eight points in total.

Exasperated, Petrarch sank back into his chair, pinching the bridge of his nose and breathing slowly for a moment.

Mr Wiseman spoke, utterly unperturbed by the amount of shouting that had just happened. “What I would like to know, if you wouldn’t mind telling us, Miss Maeroris, is what became of the partial obscurus. You appear to be in perfectly good health, unless I am much mistaken, and yet we have only been able to assume that you did in fact manage to extract the force from its protective casing. I can believe that with the help of your older friends you dealt well enough with the enchantments, but what of the obscurus itself? Such a force is not easily dissipated, I think.”

He fixed her with a penetrating look. Chiân glanced at her headteacher before answering.

“Well,” she started slowly. “For one thing, it wasn’t an obscurus. Not really.” Mr Wiseman’s eyebrows raised and he had to push his monocle back into place. “I mean, it might have been similar magic, but once we got it out over the lake-“

“You were on the lake?” said Petrarch sharply, raising his head again.

“Uh, yes. We froze it back over using, um, freezing charms. It seemed like the best place to try to deal with it,” she said sheepishly.

Mr Wiseman gave a nod. “Very sensible.”

“For Merlin’s sake, don’t _praise_ her, Julius. I’m trying to assert some discipline in this school, you know,” said Petrarch, but all his ferocity had gone. “Do go on, Chiân.”

“Okay, well, we’d gotten the enchantments off, and the others were all on broomsticks so that they could get out of the way if anything happened. And, um, well I sort of, opened it, and then I was in the memory.” She paused. “I’m assuming you guys know what’s in that memory,” she said, adding a quick “sir” as she looked at Professor Petrarch.

Petrarch and Penny said “yes” as Mr Wiseman said “no”.

The headmaster turned as if to explain it to him briefly, but Chiân cut him off. “When I was four years old I saw my parents fighting. I picked up my father’s wand and my brother tried to take it from me. I killed him. I didn’t know that before. I didn’t know that he was even dead until a few months ago, and even then I was only guessing. I know now,” she said simply.

There was a profound silence. Chiân noticed that even the portraits on the wall were staring at her. She recognised one of them as the old, bearded wizard who had given her the password on Christmas day. He was smiling.

“It wasn’t your fault, Chiân,” said Penny.

“Yeah, I know that too,” said Chiân, almost dismissively. She wasn’t sure why she was being so blunt, but she didn’t feel much inclined to discuss this particular memory with the man who had taken it and then kept it from her despite her requests.

“Tell us what you meant about the obscurus – or supposed obscurus,” said Mr Wiseman.

Chiân drew in a thoughtful breath. “I think… what you said about corrupted magic, sir – it made sense once I saw the memory that I was like, reacting against wands. But I think my magic just got pushed into other places instead of becoming a true obscurus. Like, instead of repressing it I just pushed it into, well, a projection.”

“Of what?”

“Tian.”

Mr Wiseman was smiling his strange, satisfied smile again. Professor Petrarch was looking both troubled and confused as he considered this.

She told them about seeing Tian after she had regained the memory, and how he had explained that the grief and suppression of the magic, the intense reactions against wands, had all been manifesting in her own projection of him. Mr Wiseman had stopped pacing as she described the way the false Tian had pointed out that, unlike a true obscurus which would have been a substance entirely other to herself, he glowed in response to her hands and was in fact part of the memory itself, bursting with the corrupted, broken magic of trauma.

“What do you mean he responded to your hands?” Petrarch frowned, stopping her.

Chiân realised they must not have known about that bit. “Oh, er, you know I mentioned the unifying charm – y’know the one that helps you find broken bits of things – well we did it so that my hands would glow when I was getting closer to the memory. It’s how we tracked it down to the archives,” she admitted.

Professor Petrarch seemed to have forgotten to be angry. “That is some very inspired thinking.” He looked quite impressed. “How did you target the spell to only illuminate your hands?”

Before she could answer Mr Wiseman interrupted.

“How did you know it would work with the memory? I would have thought that a unifying charm would only work on the physical.”

Chiân explained the reading she had been doing on Psychomancy and how they had tested her theory about the material magical substance of the mind.

They all looked impressed at this, and Chiân felt just a little proud.

She finished by recounting the events out on the ice, finishing rather lamely with her flight out of school on the back of a thestral.

Professor Petrarch let out a long sigh. “So. You and your band of renegades broke into the school archives, stole a partial obscurus – or, something like it, somehow made off with or destroyed several incredibly dangerous artifacts, froze over half the school lake, and tackled a complex and highly volatile piece of corrupted magic all in one night.”

“Not to mention finding a way to leave the school grounds,” added Mr Wiseman, almost smirking.

Petrarch rolled his eyes. “Well, I can’t say that it isn’t an achievement.” He was shaking his head. “Chiân, I am in half a mind to suspend you from school for endangering the lives of multiple of your fellow students, not to mention disobeying my direct instructions not to go looking for the memory. However,” he paused and looked very serious. “I will concede now that I was wrong to keep the memory from you. You are wise beyond your years, and clearly possess great talent and instinct where magic is concerned. I was wrong not to give you the chance to help us explore the issue, and for that, I apologise.”

Chiân didn’t know what to say. She bowed her head politely, slightly disconcerted by his sincerity. “Thank you, sir.”

“And as for your punishment,” he sighed again, and now Chiân had the distinct impression that he was fighting a smile. “I will call it quits if you will answer me one question.”

“Yes, sir?”

“Whatever became of the artifacts which are as yet unaccounted for? The Fiendfyre, the Corpulensis curse, the bones, and the egg, I believe it was?”

“Well, most of them got burnt up by the Fiendfyre, sir, and, well,” Chiân grinned. She couldn’t help herself. “Sam Garret-Ford, with the pink hair, she has something of a knack for Fiendfyre.”

Petrarch raised his eyes and hands to the heavens as Mr Wiseman chuckled. “Merlin’s beard, what ever shall we do with you, Miss Chiân? Alright, off you go. I daresay you would like to greet your friends before dinner. And please for the sake of my sanity do not make it common knowledge that you fled the school grounds on the back of a thestral. I don’t want the Gryffindors getting any ideas.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.” Chiân gave them each one last look before she shut the thick wooden doors behind her, then she ran down the stairs.

She stood for a moment in the quiet corridor, gazing around. The portraits on the walls didn’t notice her. In so many ways, nothing had changed.

Then again, in some other ways, everything had.

Chiân had been all ready to rush down to the Slytherin common room and find Vessy and Lydia, but she now found that she didn’t want to. Instead she turned in the opposite direction and headed up to the Owlery.

She didn’t have any of her writing things on her but there was always some scrap of parchment and quill lying around up there. She climbed the winding staircase thinking of her parents. Already it seemed like a month since she had seen them. She spent the rest of the afternoon sat on one of the benches in the Owlery, writing a letter to her mother.

It didn’t really say anything in particular – just that she loved her. She called down a sleek brown owl, who held his leg out cheerily. She tied it on and gave his head a stroke. “You can take this straight to my house now,” she said, smiling as she told the owl her parents’ address.

She watched it from the window, soaring out over the forest. She wondered if Steve the androgynous thestral had made it back safe. She lingered by the window for a long time, staring out into the distance, thinking about nothing at all.

A distant bell from the castle below interrupted her peaceful reverie. It was time for dinner.

She made her way slowly back down the spiral staircase and joined the flow of students. A few people were looking at her curiously, but most did not notice her.

Until, that is, she reached the Great Hall.

“FIREBUG,” came a yell, followed by several other shouts of greeting. Chiân found herself grinning again as a whole section of the Gryffindor table jumped to their feet to applaud her. Ozzy and Theo had scrambled out of their seats, but someone else got there first.

Two pairs of arms wrapped around her, lifting her off her feet. It was Pretoria and Sam, laughing and hugging her fit to burst. They let her go so that the others could have a go crushing the air out of her lungs.

A surprising number of students got up to shake her hand as she passed their tables, many of them people she had never spoken to. A few of them said things like “congrats on breaking into the vaults. Incredible”, or “did you really fly out of school on an invisible horse at five in the morning?” She also noticed that most of them didn’t seem to know her name, instead calling her the name Ozzy had given her, ‘Firebug’.

Chiân decided she didn’t mind if that stuck. It was better than ‘broomstick girl’ at any rate.

The other Slytherins lost no time in telling her how famous she had become in her week’s absence. Vessy and Lydia were sat on either side of her as she ate, talking non-stop about the rumours and stories and legends her adventure had birthed into the school consciousness. It reminded Chiân uncannily of lunch with the Pemberton kids, though she did not share this thought.

Within another week life had settled to pretty much a normal rhythm again, though there wasn’t really any such thing at Hogwarts. The spring months turned to summer months, and Chiân was revising with the rest of them, reading late into the night and participating in the age old tradition of resenting the older students for telling you that your exams were a breeze compared to theirs.

Miss Mary Mollis had not been able to do anything at all about Pretoria’s antlers, but at any rate everyone seemed to agree that they suited her. She and Sam were quite an ostentatious couple, and Chiân couldn’t have been fonder of them.

The school Quidditch cup wracked up into a brutal finale between Ravenclaw and Gryffindor. Gryffindor had won by three hundred and twenty points to two hundred and fifty, but not before Ozzy had given himself another spectacular bloody nose when his quaffle pass had collided with a bludger mid-air and rebounded into his face. Poor Courtney Thaler, a fifth year beater on the Ravenclaw team, had had every single one of her teeth knocked out by no fewer than four bludgers. Miss Mary Mollis had managed to grow her some new ones by the evening, though.

Chiân spent every possible moment of her Saturdays down at the Rubeus sanctuary. Shanti had been stunned when Chiân told her of Boba’s heroics that night. After telling Pofessor Meyerbeer the story Shanti had gotten permission to take Chiân into one of the greenhouses which was very much out of bounds to non-staff under normal circumstances. She showed her a long row of incredible, colourful, spiny plants, growing in thick, stifling humidity. They were Guivernia plants. Apparently it was not common knowledge that Hogwarts was in possession of these, as they were extremely rare, very difficult to look after, and almost invaluable on the black market.

After what she had seen from the contents of only one pod, Chiân could understand why. Despite the powerful heat of the greenhouse Chiân had shivered as Shanti informed her that the Guivernian pod had almost certainly saved Pretoria’s life.

Shanti had also told her that Boba’s favourite food in all the world was cream cheese, and so it became a Saturday habit to get up early and stop by the kitchens on her way to the sanctuary. Chiân thought there might not be enough cream cheese in all the world to thank the demiguise, but she brought it for him anyway.

Her long, glorious Saturdays in the Rubeus House and Gardens meant that Chiân had to work with a little more efficiency than her housemates in exam term, but this wasn’t a problem. She had received an official caution from Professor Wexel after she got caught in the Gryffindor common room, and so the library was where she mostly saw Asher and the others. Even Ozzy, facing his OWLs, was there from time to time.

Chiân’s wandwork had never been stronger, and she exceeded almost everybody in her class in her charms exam. She got top marks in Care of Magical Creatures and in Potions. Transfiguration had gone slightly less well, but – as she explained innocently in her letter to her parents – she had not really studied for that one. All in all she had passed with flying colours, and drew near the end of the year feeling very satisfied with herself.

She had not been bothered by twinges of memory or violent outbursts of magic since she and her friends had broken into the secret library of fire. She occasionally thought about trying to do magic without her wand, but was too busy learning and getting into trouble with Vessy and Lydia to worry about it.

Her six companions down in the library archives had all gained some level of notoriety throughout the school, though none so much as Chiân. The name ‘Firebug’ really had stuck, and she was constantly turning her head in the corridors as students she didn’t even know called it out to her.

Occasionally the seven of them would all end up together out on the grounds, looking across the lake, or sitting in the library and exchanging grins with each other every time someone entered the restricted section. For the most part, though, she only saw the older Gryffindors in passing.

Sam had taught the rest of them the counter-charm for Fiendfyre, though had pointed out that they would have very little way to gauge if they were doing it successfully until faced with actual Fiendfyre. None of them were too keen to rush ahead and test this.

Chiân’s birthday was in mid-June, just after the end of exams. Without telling her, the other six had agreed to sit together on the Gryffindor table that morning for breakfast, surprising Chiân as she stumbled in with Lydia and Vessy at half past eight. Pretoria and Sam, it turned out, had gone down to the kitchens early that morning and got the house elves to cook a whole batch of soft pretzels.

It was the best morning she’d had all year. Vessy and Lydia also joined them at the Gryffindor table, as well as Calix and Benji, and Zach and May from Ravenclaw. They were chatting loudly with Tiff, and Max, sat opposite Asher and Chiân, who were only half listening.

“Top ten questions science still can’t answer,” said Asher with his mouth full, watching some of the ghosts float across the hall. “Why do I get the damn Ghostbusters theme stuck in my head every time I see a ghost?”

Chiân grinned and pointed half a pretzel at the Bloody Baron. “Top ten saddest anime deaths – number one: the Bloody Baron.”

He laughed. “God, I miss youtube.”

“Plan for next year: work out how to fix Hogwarts up with wifi,” she suggested.

“Deal,” he grinned, pinching Calix’s last piece of bacon while he wasn’t looking.

They joined in the conversation the older students were having, which was about the Triwizard tournament. Apparently this would be taking place at Hogwarts next year.

“It only happens every five years so it hasn’t been hosted here for fifteen,” Becky explained to her and Asher.

Chiân and Asher exchanged looks of glee. Pretoria spotted this and waved her pretzel at them. “Don’t get too excited, guys. You can only enter if you’re seventeen or older.”

Chiân huffed in disappointment, but Asher elbowed her.

“That means it’ll be happening in our seventh year!” he gave her a look of absolute excitement.

“Alright, set up the first Hogwarts wifi network, then win the Triwizard tournament?” she said, daring him.

“You’re on.” They shook on it.

Asher was fast becoming her best friend. Though she loved Lydia and Vessy, Asher matched her cool sense of adventure, and he also giggled slightly less, which was refreshing.

Chiân had not told Vessy and Lydia everything. In fact she hadn’t even told the people who had been with her in the vault everything, but they did remain the only people who knew what happened to her brother. She didn’t mention the week at home with her parents to anybody. It was wrapped up safely and tucked deep in her heart. If she had felt like over-romanticising it she would have speculated that it was in the same space which had for much of the year been an empty slot, a wound in her memory.

Too soon came the end of the year.

The Slytherin common room was delightful in the summer light. The sunshine penetrated the lake far enough that the whole chamber was filled with the mysterious, shimmering blue light of the water. Several afternoons they had seen the giant squid, ambling lazily by on a distant current. The aquarium wall running through the dormitories was filled with an array of curious water snakes and little green plants that swam and snatched at the fish. Chiân delayed packing her case for as long as she possibly could, watching the aquatic life flit back and forth through the bubbles.

The hardest goodbye had been down in the Rubeus House and Gardens. Boba had now completed his course of treatment for para-tics and would at some point in the summer be travelling back to his home in Indonesia. Chiân had actually cried as she said goodbye to him. He clambered happily into her arms as soon as he saw her, and had touched her face in concern when he saw that she was upset.

The staff worker, a short black-skinned wizard named Roman, had discreetly busied himself with some other task. Most of them knew Chiân by now, hailing her with a shout of ‘Firebug!’, and waving if they saw her around.

She gave Boba his parting present. It was sort of sentimental and she wasn’t certain that he would understand, but he seemed to like it. Chiân had kept the two halves of the Guivernian pod, and had pierced each one with a little string, reinforced with magic. She showed Boba that she was wearing hers around her neck. His eyes had flashed blue as he took it in his tiny fingers, and he had examined it carefully for a long moment. Then he put the string over his head and looked up at her proudly.

Chiân laughed, wiping her nose on her sleeve. “Yes, I also brought you some cream cheese – I know, I know. I promise if I see you again I’ll lead with that.”

The first years joined the rest of the school in the carriages down to Hogsmeade station. Chiân followed Vessy, Lydia, Egan, and Calix as they loaded into the seats, but before she could climb in she heard a soft whinny.

She looked around. One of the thestrals several carriages down was looking at her and pawing at the ground as if trying to catch her attention. She recognised it immediately.

“Steve!” she cried, and ran over. A group of nearby Hufflepuffs stared at her like she had absolutely lost her mind. Chiân could appreciate that her affectionate petting of the thestral must look utterly lunatic if you couldn’t see the thestral. However, she did not care.

Lydia stuck her head out of the carriage door. “Oi, Firebug!”

“Coming,” she yelled back, and gave Steve a kiss on its strange, scaly head.

Chiân spent the first part of the journey on the Hogwarts Express in a crowded compartment that contained all the Slytherin first years as well as May, Zach, and Colby Hutchinson from Ravenclaw.

The Ravenclaws had won the house cup that year, despite Gryffindor’s victory on the Quidditch pitch. This was more than slightly Chiân’s fault: between them Ozzy, Theo, Becky, and Asher had lost their house just under 1400 points for that one night. They hadn’t seemed to mind. Theo had pointed out that Ozzy had almost managed to equal this score single-handedly in previous years, and that they would be redoubling their efforts in the future.

Chiân was feeling a sort of melancholy she knew her friends were sharing as they sped away from the castle. As a kid the six week summer holiday had felt gloriously infinite. Now it stretched in a grey, glum kind of way – still unfathomably long, but far less glorious.

After the lunch trolley stopped by their compartment she excused herself to the first years and went to find Pretoria and Sam. She wanted to say goodbye.

She was slipping past students in the corridor of the train when a girl she vaguely recognised came running up to her.

“Firebug! Oz is looking for you. He said he has something important to tell you,” she sounded breathlessly excited about it.

“Where is he?” said Chiân.

“Erm,” said the girl, and the way she said it made Chiân remember that this was one of Ozzy’s sisters, a second year Gryffindor. She had an identical expression of uncertain bemusement.

“I’ll find him, don’t worry,” said Chiân cheerfully. “If you see him again tell him I’m headed to see Pretoria and Sam, so I’ll be with them.”

“Okay!”

She had only gone past two more compartments however when another head popped out. This time it was a Ravenclaw sixth year. Chiân recognised him as one of Shanti’s friends. In fact Shanti was in the compartment and waved at her from behind him.

“Hey, Firebug,” said the boy.

“Yes?” she waved back at Shanti then looked at the boy.

“Uh, Christine just came through to tell us to tell you that Theo Wells is looking for you. From Gryffindor,” he added unnecessarily.

Chiân refrained from rolling her eyes. “Okay, thanks.”

Another ten steps and all of the Gryffindor first year girls came rushing out to meet her.

“Asher’s just gone to look for you!” said Dory.

“He said that Ozzy and Theo were-“

“Yes, I’ve heard,” said Chiân, definitely bemused now. “If he comes back tell him I’m going to see Pretoria and Sam, okay?”

They chorused that they would, assuring her that it was very important news.

Two more people stopped her as she moved down the train. One third year Hufflepuff told her with real urgency that Becky had been by to ask them to tell her if they saw her that they should tell her that Oscar had asked Becky to find her. Before Chiân could even make sense of this a drawling second year Ravenclaw had arrested her in the passage to tell her that the Gryffindor first years had told the Ravenclaw first years to tell their friends that if they saw Chiân they should tell her that Asher had come back and that they had told him that she had told them that she had gone to see Pretoria and Sam. Chiân’s head was starting to hurt.

Looking into each compartment as she went, Chiân spotted some of the other Slytherin sixth years and slid open the door.

“Hey, Firebug,” said Demi from the corner.

“Hey. Have you guys seen Pretoria and Sam? I wanted to say goodbye.”

Ellen raised her eyebrows. “They just left.”

“Don’t tell me-“ started Chiân.

“They went to look for you,” said David.

“Oh, and they mentioned that if we were to see you we should tell you Ozzy Ziento’s looking for you” added Paul. “Apparently there’s some news.” They all laughed at the expression on Chiân’s face.

“Great,” she said sarcastically, and shut the compartment door again.

She looked up and down the carriage. The train carriages were too short to see very far. She decided to keep going in the direction she had been moving, towards the front of the train.

A door slid open as she passed. “Hey, Chiân, my sister’s looking for you.” It was Han.

“Oh for god’s sake, I _know_ ,” said Chiân.

Han grinned. “I’ll tell her you went that way.”

“You do that.” She moved past.

She was just giving up completely when she heard her name.

“Chiân! Hey, Chiân!”

“Maeroris, come here you dingbat- oi, move.”

Chiân turned and saw Sam and Pretoria wading through some second years.

“Guys, hey – what’s going on? I’ve been looking for you,” she said, meeting them in the slightly wider space between carriages.

“We’ve been looking for you, too. Apparently Oz has some news.”

“So I have heard, from just about every person on the train,” said Chiân.

Just then Becky appeared. “Oh, there you are! I’ve been looking for you guys. Ozzy says he needs to talk to us.”

“We know,” they all said.

“I am not hunting up and down this train for another minute,” said Pretoria. “Oh, hey, Zambri,” she called to a passing Ravenclaw girl. “If you see Ziento or Wells can you tell them we’re here? Thanks.”

The girl agreed and had just vanished into the next carriage when Asher appeared, looking slightly sweaty. “Oh, there you guys are. I’ve been looking for you. Oz-“

“We _know_ ,” they chorused again. Asher looked surprised.

“Oh. Alright, then.” He joined Chiân where she had sat down on the floor of the train.

Four more of the people who passed them kindly stopped to let them know that two Gryffindor fifth years were looking for them.

“If this is just them being dicks I’m gonna break all of Ziento’s fingers,” said Pretoria darkly. Sam grinned.

No sooner had she said the words than Ozzy came running past, spotted them at the last second, and nearly ran into the wall. Theo careened into him and they both stood there, panting for a second. It was immediately obvious that they really did have news.

“What is it? What’s happened?” said Becky, looking from one to the other.

They didn’t look frightened exactly, but there was a more serious urgency in both their faces than any of them had been expecting.

They both started talking at the same time.

“Just been hanging out with Shipley and Paterson-“

“-doing Care of Magical Creatures OWL-

“-talking about what happened in the vault-“

“-turns out that Fiendfyre doesn’t-“

“- what if it’s still-“

“Woah, woah, slow down, hang on,” said Pretoria. Chiân and Asher had both got to their feet.

“One at a time. Ozzy, speak.”

“Okay, well, we’ve just found out-“

“And it’s true, we’ve checked with everybody we can think of,” Theo interrupted, unable to help himself.

“Fiendfyre can’t kill basilisks.”

They all looked at him blankly for a second.

“What?” said Asher.

“Basilisks aren’t destroyed by Fiendfyre. They’re one of the only things that isn’t, but it’s a definite exception. Even in the egg they wouldn’t be killed by it.”

Chiân saw it click in the others’ faces at the exact same moment in clicked in hers.

They looked at each other.

Pretoria leant back against the wall of the train carriage, one hand automatically touching her antlers.

“Well _shit_ ,” she said.

_fin_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> An audio recording of this chapter can be found here:
> 
> https://soundcloud.com/kristin-briggs/chapter-seventeen-fire-cannot-kill-a-dragon-audio-recording/s-HaFFJkjjVnH


End file.
